A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (23 page)

I’d learnt a few Darija words myself, of course, for things relating to the restoration. There were
gayzas
and the
roqsa
and also
traab
(rubble),
zbel
(household rubbish),
hmar
(donkey),
shnou?
(what?),
schuuf
(look),
mezyan
(good),
mezyan bezzaf
(very good),
mumtaz
(fantastic) and
mumkin
(maybe). Our most used expression was
mushi mushkil
– not a problem.

As I stared down at the placement test, I felt overcome with panic. It was like one of those nightmares in which you find yourself resitting your high-school exams. I scanned the page, which offered multiple-choice questions, the first of which was
Si allant au cinéma? Il y a une demande, un imperatif, un ordre ou une interrogation?
Who the hell knew? Certainly not me. I cast a sideways glance at my neighbour, a man from further down the African continent, who appeared to be as stumped as I was.

I took a stab that it was A, and from there on the questions got worse. At the end I had to write a page-long description of ‘my city’. Every tense I knew other than the present had flown from my head, and my piece read like the work of a retarded ten-year-old. My concentration wasn’t helped by people who had forgotten to turn off their mobiles, or by the constant interruptions of the teacher, who issued streams of incomprehensible instructions.

I handed in my paper just before the hour was up, my only consolation being that I wasn’t the last to finish. I saw a younger woman just beginning her description. At least when I ended up in the class for dummies I wouldn’t be alone.

But somehow I was put in the second-top class. Had I fluked the exam or was there a mistake? Whatever the reason, I was way out of my depth, and endured a terrifying class every weekday evening for a month. The bell rang at six-thirty p.m. and we all
trooped
into the classroom like a bunch of schoolkids. If you were late it was too bad, because they locked the gates. The other students in my class were in their twenties and keen to further their job prospects. I felt uncomfortable and out of place as the only foreigner and the only person over the age of thirty.

The teacher was a dynamic and energetic Moroccan woman in her fifties. She had a Socratic teaching method, her intelligent gaze shifting constantly across the sea of faces. You never knew when she was going to launch a question at you like a guided missile. I sat there in pure dread, muttering, ‘Not me, please, not me.’ The rest of the class gabbled on fluently in French, discussing intricate points of grammar, while I was still coming to grips with what had been said. Although I was acquainted with the various verb forms, we were not yet on speaking terms. And I certainly couldn’t address the past and future versions by their first names. I was used to being treated with indulgence in French classes, and being able to clarify points in English, but here that was impossible – neither the teacher nor any of the other students spoke it.

It was a baptism of fire. At the end of a month, my vocabulary had increased significantly but my verbs were still hit-and-miss.

Building rubble had begun to assume a huge role in our lives. It was something we generated in vast amounts as we dug out floors and walls, and disposing of it entailed shovelling it into sacks and having them carted away by teams of donkeys.

One Sunday, we were in the process of interviewing a new
carpenter
when one of our regular donkey men came running into the house, shouting in Darija. Si Mohamed asked him what had happened, and the man gave a long, complicated explanation, the gist of which was that his donkeys had been taken.

Evidently the man had been making a delivery of lime and sand, and was about to start loading the rubble when our least favourite official, the Maqadim, turned up. He announced that since we didn’t have a permit to put bags of rubble on the street, he was going to confiscate the animals until we paid a fine, and he had taken the six little donkeys off goodness knows where. It was the equivalent of having your car towed.

This was the first we’d heard about needing a permit for rubble. We had a
roqsa
, a building permit, and it seemed self-evident that building would create rubble. Our riad was at the end of an alley and our bags of rubble weren’t blocking anyone’s access, so what was the problem?

Regardless of logic, the situation was an emergency. Six donkeys had been kidnapped and the donkey man’s livelihood was threatened. This was a full-on donkey hostage crisis.

As the donkey team had been subcontracted by our building merchant, it was his responsibility, and Mustapha decided to phone him, shouting down the handpiece as though he didn’t trust the telephone to convey the news all the way to Bab Guissa.

‘It will be all right,’ Mustapha reported at the end of the call. ‘The merchant is an important man and knows the Caid. He does a lot of work for him, removing the rubble when houses collapse. He will sort it out.’

The Caid was one of the top officials in Fez and not a man to be messed with. It seemed a big ask that he would turn his attention from important matters to our donkey crisis, and we didn’t hold out much hope, but to our surprise, strings were pulled and a couple of heavies were sent to talk to the Maqadim. He caved in, and a few hours later we found the six donkeys standing outside our door.

Not wanting to show his face, the Maqadim had released the donkeys at the bottom of the alley, given them a whack, and they had obediently trotted up to our place. A much relieved donkey man returned to work loading our rubble with a grin from ear to ear.

But he could barely keep up with the rate at which rubble was produced, and to avoid being buried in it we hired a young man to do nothing but sweep, clean and fill bags of it. Our sweeper had a ready smile and an incredibly literal frame of mind, so that if you asked him to clean an area he would remove everything in his path, including the little marble drain covers that kept out rats, cockroaches and flies – and possibly djinns. My plastic slip-on shoes also disappeared in the clean-up.

In order to protect the ancient
zellij
on the stairs to the first floor, Sandy asked the sweeper to cover them in plastic and top this with an inch of plaster, the idea being that we would pull up the whole lot, plastic, plaster and all, when work was completed. Si Mohamed relayed this instruction, and the next thing we knew, the sweeper had covered the stairs in plastic and upended two bags of dry plaster on them. When his error was pointed out he swept up every last speck and, as instructed, mixed in some water.

‘Your idea was not so good,’ he said a little while later.

‘Why not?’

He pointed to three buckets. Each was filled to the brim with plaster – set hard as a rock.

The electricians, having been at the riad for just a week, were almost finished. Overall, we’d been impressed with their speed and efficiency, particularly one bearded fellow with glasses whom we nicknamed the professor. He asked detailed questions about what we wanted and made intelligent suggestions. Around his neck he wore a silver chain depicting a figure carrying a ladder.

‘Charlie Chaplin,’ came the reply when I asked him who it was. ‘He is my hero.’

This did make sense, given that The Tramp’s movies involved all kinds of gags with ladders, and reflected some of the slapstick situations the professor himself had experienced in his work.

The professor was also a wonderful cook and regularly invited us to share the electricians’ lunch, which included things like
kefta
– small spiced meatballs – and eggs. As our contribution we would send the sweeper out to the souk with a pot, which would be brought back filled with
besara
, a simple but delicious split-pea soup. With the addition of black olives and bread, and accompanied by, strangely, Coca-Cola, this made for a more interesting lunch than the sandwiches Sandy and I normally had. We would all sit together in a circle, dipping our bread into the various dishes and making appreciative noises.

David, on one of his inspections, reckoned we had done things in reverse order, and would need to do some rewiring after our structural work. But it was too late to change now. He had never got around to rewiring his own house, and I could see why. He probably couldn’t stand the trauma of seeing his beautiful, carefully restored walls burrowed into in such a cavalier fashion.

Fully occupied with running the American Language Center during the week, David usually made his tour of inspection on Saturday mornings. He would come for a cup of coffee and check on the progress. Sandy and I looked forward to these visits and dreaded them at the same time. He invariably found something wrong that we hadn’t noticed, and which was time-consuming, expensive and tricky to fix. But we had to admit he was always right.

Mustapha merely dreaded these visits. ‘
Monsieur David?
’ he said, rolling his eyes and flicking his fingers. ‘
Oh, là là!
’

One Saturday, David took a look in the kitchen, where a hole had been cut in a supporting wall to allow a window onto the courtyard. ‘What are you doing? You haven’t got a structural support for the roof!’ He said this in a tone that made it sound as if we were allowing a three-year-old to play on a busy road. Mustapha’s face fell and he scurried off to get scaffolding to fix it.

Meanwhile other things were on the move. After four false and frustrating attempts, we finally engaged a new carpenter. Finding a carpenter in Fez has a lot in common with dating. There’s the giddy excitement of thinking you’ve found someone special, followed by days of chasing them on the phone or waiting for them
to
ring you. Then he turns out to have so many other offers he can’t possibly see you again, or his work is less attractive than you initially thought, or so expensive you can’t afford him anyway.

But at last we hired a bright, enthusiastic and funny young man named Noureddine, whose first contribution was to announce that we needed to replace the entire kitchen ceiling. This was made of four huge supporting beams, dozens of
gayzers
, and a layer of planks, revealed when we removed the false ceiling.

We liked the way the ancient cedar beams were blackened with years of smoke from cooking fires, and wanted to keep them as they were. We hadn’t allowed for their replacement in our budget at all, but Noureddine thought the ends of the beams looked dodgy, and many were broken. As replacing them meant removing the intricate
zellij
on the floor above, then digging out more than a foot of earth used as insulating material, it was a less than thrilling prospect. But David was also of the opinion it needed to be done.

‘The
zellij
is only recent,’ he scoffed, ‘1920s or so.’

So suddenly we were committed to removing and replacing an entire ceiling and floor. As the room above the kitchen led to the one we were now using as our bedroom, I wondered how exactly we would get there.

It also meant another trip to the Hole of Moulay Idriss for more
gayzas
. I was disappointed in the quality on offer this time – they were either bowed or full of rot. Then I spotted some massive beams, the longest almost five metres, as solid as any I’d seen, and so thick I imagined they must have been cut from trees hundreds of years old.

I tried to hide the glow in my eyes, but purchasing them for a good price turned out to be remarkably easy. Getting them home was less so. After being trucked to R’Cif, they were carried to our place, where the porters insisted on much more money than we’d agreed on because they hadn’t realised the beams were so heavy. An argument broke out between the porters and Si Mohamed, with a lot of angry gesticulating, shouting, and puffing out and pushing in of chests. The decapo ladies and Mustapha stood muttering darkly that the ringleader was crazy because he smoked too much hashish.

We ended up meeting the porters’ demands halfway, and then had to find a way to get the huge beams inside. I figured they were far too long to fit around the turn in the stairs, and then suddenly it dawned on me what one of the old walled-up windows we’d discovered in the kitchen was for. It was in line with the front door, and I’d assumed it had been used for urns of oil and other supplies, but now I saw that it was the perfect size and position for getting long beams in. Within an hour the window was reopened, and with many grunts and the occasional curse, they were pushed through into the house.