A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (26 page)

The journey to Sefrou took a couple of hours, the landscape changing from the Sais Plain to olive groves to rocky fields as we began to ascend the foothills. Unlike much of the rest of Morocco, the vegetation in the Middle Atlas is luxuriant. The region is sparsely populated by Berber people, and villages are few and far between. It felt good to be out in fresh air after so much dust and rubble at home.

As the road began to climb more steeply, we came across orchards, with roadside stalls selling produce. It being midsummer, the cherries had just finished, but there were other rows of dark trees, their branches weighed down with the golden orbs of oranges. The pickers were in among them, men and women in colourful, practical clothing, some with small children on their backs. Donkeys with panniers waited patiently nearby to carry the loads of fruit.

Sefrou is a charming town, intersected by a rushing river with a picturesque bridge and surrounded by impressive crenellated ramparts. It takes its name from the Berber tribe that originally settled
there
more than two thousand years ago. That tribe had converted to Judaism, but in his usual persuasive way, Moulay Idriss I ensured they became Islamic in the eighth century. Four centuries later, the town grew wealthy through trade with the Sahara, and a hundred years after that, a large number of Jewish refugees arrived from southern Algeria. Now the majority of Jews have gone to Israel, but the architecture of Sefrou’s Medina still reflects their influence, with external balconies overhanging the alleys.

Leaving the taxi outside the main gate, we wandered through the curving streets, looking for the old cedar furniture that we’d been told the residents of Sefrou were discarding in favour of wood veneer. The town had a reputation as one of the best places to buy such things, but although we scoured the streets we didn’t find a single item.

There was every variety of fruit and vegetable, of first-rate quality – shiny purple eggplants, bright yellow zucchini flowers, glowing tomatoes, luscious lemons, just-picked plums, gently ripening avocados. If we’d been making a slap-up banquet for fifty we would have been in heaven. But sadly, nothing you could sit on.

Just as we were giving up, we spotted a familiar face. It was the waiter from Café Firdous in Fez, who confirmed that, yes, there was a market on today but it wasn’t here. Kindly he offered to show us the way, and we followed him for some distance through the backstreets. Our hopes rose as we came upon a number of parked vans, and beyond them a stream of people heading for a ramshackle clutch of tarpaulins. Surely this must be the market.

It was. But the entire place was filled with more fruit and
vegetables
. Crestfallen, we bought a kilo of nectarines and slunk away, all thoughts of French colonial wardrobes, chests of drawers and chairs expurgated from our minds.

Back in the taxi, we headed south-east to Azrou, by way of Ifrane. Winding our way up the mountain roads, we caught the occasional glimpse of a Barbary ape going about its business among the cedar and holm-oak forests. Then, on the outskirts of Ifrane, a curious cultural displacement occurred. Swiss-style chalets with steeply pitched roofs and shutters started to appear at regular intervals, giving the incongruous impression that we’d somehow been whisked off to the Swiss Alps.

The streets of Ifrane itself are broad and clean, with chalets so Alpine you almost expect a cuckoo to pop out of the shutters. They are the legacy of French homesickness during the colonial era, when petty officials created a kind of theme park so they could pretend they were back in Europe on weekends.

In the nearby forest, the last wild Atlas lion in North Africa was gunned down in 1922, a victim of the French predilection for killing for pleasure. The Romans had put a serious dent in their number some two millenniums previously when they exported thousands to kill those pesky Christians (before deciding Christianity wasn’t such a bad idea after all). Nowadays the central park in Ifrane sports a concrete statue of the last lion, beside which tourists pose for photos.

The road into the nearby town of Azrou is also lined with chalets, and its European architecture echoes the health-resort town it was during French rule. Being in the middle of a Berber
area
, it has a reputation for carpets at much better prices than those in Fez, which have passed through several middle-men. The proprietor of one small shop took us to see the bulk of his stock, kept in a house close by. Propping ourselves on the window ledge, we settled in for a session.

Carpet buying is not something to be done in a hurry. There is a certain ritual to be followed. Even if your eye has alighted on the very thing you want, you cannot simply say, ‘I want to see that,’ then make a deal and be done with it. You must wait while the carpet seller shows you what is clearly his newer, inferior stock, and you should say things like, ‘Yes, that’s very nice, but it’s not right for me.’ Eventually he will offer to show you stock that is ‘special, just for you’. These carpets are always old and expensive, and you’re told they don’t make them like this any more. This particularly applies to the very piece you want.

We spent two hours going through almost all of the stock. Some carpets that looked intriguing when rolled up were disappointing once unfurled. We put things we liked into the
mumkin
– maybe – pile, and when it came time to choose, Jenny and I both wanted the same one, cream with lovely bands of embroidery in reds and browns. Carpet viewing with people other than your partner is potentially fraught for this very reason, but Jenny and I managed to resolve the matter peacefully, with her ceding me my first choice and buying a vibrant orange carpet she liked almost as much.

I returned to Fez refreshed, and a few days later I was coming back from the Hole of Moulay Idriss when I ran into David deep in the Medina. He was on his way to inspect a Koranic school
that
he was paying to have restored, and I went along to have a look. David spent a lot of his own money on such community projects, including street façades, old schools and fountains. The Koranic school was a single room squashed between houses, with a pretty,
masharabbia-screened
window facing the street. Because of David’s exacting standards, the restoration had been going on for months, but the timeframe wasn’t helped by some of the workers’ methods.

Left to his own devices, the master craftsman responsible for restoring the
medluk
on the wall did less than a metre a day, and David had made him speed up. The
medluk
was now cracking in places, something the craftsman blamed on being urged to go too fast, but which David suspected was a result of not allowing enough time for the lime and sand mix to cure. We had decided against using
medluk
in our riad for this reason; we didn’t have the space to make a huge pile of it while we waited the month or so it needed to cure.

David and I stopped for a snack at a tiny stall run by a round, jolly young woman and her rake-thin husband. It consisted of a table, a glass cabinet with simple dishes displayed, and a gas burner with a pot. We ate stewed beans, beetroot salad, fried fish and bread, while eyeing a pan full of sizzling oil into which were being dropped crumbed sardines, freshly cut potato chips and other vegetables. When the husband put a couple of whole capsicums into the pan they exploded, spattering fat far and wide, including a couple of drops on my scalp. Needless to say, they hurt, and when the woman covered her eyes I thought she must have had a direct
hit
too – but no, she took her hand away and I saw that she was laughing.

After parting company with David, I walked back through the souk. Glancing into the depths of a herbalist’s shop, I saw hanging up at the back various animal skins, including some kind of small spotted wildcat. It was no doubt endangered, I thought, and wondered how you overcame hundreds or thousands of years of superstition merely by telling people that putting bits of animals into magic potions was more likely to result in the vanishing of the species than in any cure.

Further along, above another stall, hung a tiny cage, the floor of which was crawling with baby tortoises. Clinging to the bars were two grey and miserable-looking chameleons. I had only ever seen photographs of them before, and stopped to look. Their swivel eyes were desperately trying to project past the cage, as if willing themselves out of its confines. One of them was so skinny that I doubted it was going to last much longer in such conditions. Finding live insects for food didn’t seem to be a high priority for the young stallholder.

I had seen young boys in southern Morocco hunting and capturing lizards to sell to just this kind of stall. These chameleons would have been happily minding their own business in their native habitat before being whisked away by small probing fingers, whose owners were eager for a few dirhams. I couldn’t bear to see these reptiles in such horrible circumstances and wanted to buy them. But what was I going to do with a couple of chameleons? We couldn’t have more pets if we were going to shuttle back and forth
between
Morocco and Australia. We already had responsibility for three cats on different sides of the planet, including temporary custody of Tigger, Peter and Karen’s cat.

I thought of the abundance of kittens on the rubbish heap at the end of our alley. Every day I’d see one or two huddled together among the detritus. Often they’d be gone by the next day and I wondered what became of them.

One morning, I passed a tiny tabby that was mewing pitifully. It had one eye gummed shut and looked incredibly pathetic. I was in an agony of wanting to rescue it, but knew that any help I gave could only be temporary. If I took it home and fed it I couldn’t then put it back on the street, it would be too cruel. There was one animal protection society in Fez, but they mostly dealt with donkeys and wouldn’t take cats, so what to do?

I’d kept walking, and when I returned that way the tabby was being fed cream cheese by an elderly man kneeling down beside it in the dirt. Then the lovely old baker from the bakery at the end of our alley came along and poured water for it out of a bottle.

Another man stopped and said to me, ‘It’s the man along that street who’s the problem. He lets his cats go on having kittens then puts them on the rubbish pile. It is not right. It says in the Koran that there is a place reserved for cats in Paradise.’

I smiled in agreement. But one cat in the riad was plenty. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if Peter and Karen didn’t return in time to reclaim Tigger; I couldn’t put her back on the street either. As it was I needed to get her fixed before she got pregnant and our cat problem multiplied. Peter had left me some money for the
operation
, and when I’d rung around the local vets I found the cost ranged from six hundred to fifteen hundred dirhams, which seemed wildly disproportionate to the two hundred dirhams we’d paid for one of our workers to visit the doctor. No wonder there were so many stray cats in Fez if it took more than two weeks of the average wage to have them neutered.

So why should I adopt chameleons over cats? Apart from a childhood fascination with their ability to magically change colour, perhaps because they were an endangered species. They were tugging at me to buy them, but how would I look after them? I didn’t want to replace their prison in the shop for yet another cage at the riad.

I toyed with the possibility of finding a good tree in the countryside to put them in, but where? And if I was followed, which would be likely, another set of boys would find them and they’d end up back in the market. I could put them on our citrus trees, where they might find enough insects to survive, but how would they live through the cold winter? And in buying them, wouldn’t I simply be encouraging a trade I despised?

Trying to harden my heart by being rational, I walked away, leaving the chameleons to their fate. But the image of them clinging to their bars pursued me all the way home. I told Sandy about them.

‘There are thousands of chameleons in cages all over Morocco,’ he said. ‘You can’t rescue them all.’

I felt like Tessa in John Le Carre’s
The Constant Gardener
, who says to her husband, ‘But these are ones I can rescue.’ In her
case
it was African people. Chameleons may not rate as high on the nobleness scale, but I figured you helped who and what you could, to the best of your ability.

Later I told Si Mohamed about them, who relayed the story to the workers, who no doubt thought I was soft in the head. But it was what they said next that decided us. According to Mustapha, whereas tortoises were usually bred in captivity, kept as pets and fed lettuce leaves, chameleons were more likely to find themselves thrown live into a fire as part of ritual magic. There was a belief that their skin and bones contained a substance that made errant husbands return to their wives, and a woman who suspected her husband of having an affair would lace his food with bits of powdered chameleon.

The thought of the poor creatures being burned alive was enough to win Sandy over, and Si Mohamed and I returned to the stall. For a mere thirty dirhams the chameleons were ours. They clung to one another as we put them into a plastic container. Carrying them down the street, Si Mohamed became a kind of Pied Piper. Small children immediately sensed there was something alive in the translucent box and followed him, wanting a look. One little boy shrieked at the top of his lungs when Si Mohamed took the top off the box to show him.

Back at home, I took the box up to the catwalk and Sandy lifted the chameleons gingerly onto the upper branches of the orange tree, safe from the inquisitive Tigger. They were thoroughly entwined, not keen to let one another go. But the prospect of a branch was too enticing, and eventually they reached out and
grabbed
the outermost limb. As we watched, their colour changed, morphing from sickly grey to pale green. The fatter one, whom we decided to call Bodiecia, made an immediate break for freedom, disappearing among the leaves. We named the other one Genghis – not that he looked at all fearsome. He was so painfully skinny he resembled an anorexia victim, and I worried that he was too far gone to survive.