A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (29 page)

This self-justification went round and round in my head, but by morning I felt resolved. When the sweeper turned up next day
I
told him I couldn’t employ him full-time and he needed to look elsewhere. In a few weeks, when the carpenters had finished and the wages bill was more manageable, things might be different, I said, but in the meantime I would give him a week’s severance pay. He accepted this with grace and I detected more than a hint of relief. Si Mohamed said it was a better deal than the sweeper would have expected, having only worked with us for a few weeks.

Shortly after this, during an inspection, Rachid Haloui declared it necessary to get a specialist plumber in to check our link to the main drain. I had a vision of a state-of-the-art plumber turning up with a tiny camera on a tube, so we could see the nefarious netherworld. Of course, it was nothing like that.

The specialist was what was known as a
kwadsee
, a plumber who dealt with public drains. He resembled a gnome, even more so when he discarded his traditional dress and popped on a woolly cap with a pompom. He had brought a bundle of what looked like long twigs but turned out to be pieces of metal. The only other equipment he had was a pick, a chisel and a trowel. We lent him a spade, and in a very short time he had made a deep hole in the street right outside the front door.

All the while he worked, the
kwadsee
kept up a constant stream of chatter. Si Mohamed relayed that we were lucky we got in first that morning because he had also been asked to find a set of gold false teeth, ‘worth a million centimes’, that had somehow become lost in a drain. Just how this had happened stretched the imagination. Had their wearer been bending over the loo while brushing his teeth? Throwing up? Having an argument in the
kitchen
, and shouting so loud they popped out of his mouth and went down the drain?

I asked how old the
kwadsee
had been when he started his job and he held his hand half a metre from the ground. As with chimneysweeps in older times, small bodies were better able to get into tiny crevices.

‘In the early days,’ he said, ‘I used to find all sorts of good things, like gold rings and earrings. These days the pickings are lean.’

He went on to complain about the cost of living in the Medina.

When he was young everything was so cheap he had done quite well. Nowadays he could barely scrape a living together. I guessed the hundred and fifty dirhams I was being charged for a couple of hours’ work was way above what his regular clients paid.

While digging, the
kwadsee
discarded his shoes and I could see him feeling around with his toes to find where the water pipe was. I went back to my writing, and when I popped my head out the door a while later, the hole in the alley had grown huge and all that could be seen of the
kwadsee
was his grey cap bobbing around in the cavity. He looked to be in his natural habitat.

When he pulled himself out I glimpsed an ancient wall in the darkness below. This was the original city drain, centuries old. Our connection to it was a trench, created by bricking up three sides and fitting a cover above, which had now collapsed in places. The
kwadsee
spent most of the day feeding through a sizeable plastic pipe, joining it up at either end. In some ways it was sad – the end of a system that had served the house for three hundred years – but although it was less romantic, plastic was far more practical.
Hopefully
it would do the job until the riad underwent its next major restoration in another century or two.

Sandy might have been gone but I was far from alone when the workers departed each day. I had a host of creatures sharing the riad with me. Every evening the sparrows performed, twittering in the citrus trees. There were hundreds of them. Some would take off just on dusk in a mass, while others would settle down on the catwalk, only to be roused in an indignant flurry when I went along it to bed.

One night, I went to bed to find the room full of freaked-out sparrows, flying around and crashing into the walls. I had left the light on, and perhaps my bedroom looked more appealing than theirs. They eventually settled down, clinging to the new wires hanging above the bed, which didn’t yet have a light fitting. As I wrote my nightly journal I watched their rear ends with not a little concern. I left the big doors open and they were gone by the time I woke up.

Tigger was getting very bold and was now climbing halfway up the lemon tree, causing a great deal of anxious chatter among the birds. Fortunately she never got interested in the chameleons, probably due to the glacial speed at which they moved. The chameleons were doing well. They had put on weight and spent their days beneath the ripening oranges, waiting for unwary flies. They were undemanding pets who more than earned their keep.

Mustapha arrived one morning to find Bodiecia clinging to
a
work shirt he’d washed and hung out to dry a couple of days before – his wife was away, so he was looking after himself. When he went to put the shirt on he found a kind of oversized brooch attached. Bodiecia was a definite shade of blue, trying to make herself invisible. Mustapha attempted to offload her onto the lemon tree, but instead of gripping the branch she let go and took an unexpected dip in the fountain. She was rescued on a broom handle and emerged hissing in alarm.

As the chameleons’ strength recovered so did their desire to venture further afield. While working on the
halka
, Mustapha called me in and pointed to a green speck on the top of the
massreiya
wall. I peered closely and realised it was Genghis, circumambulating the room where the decorated plaster ended and the wood began. At two storeys high, if he fell it would be the human equivalent of a base jump minus the parachute. I watched fascinated as he determinedly made his way around. Unable to cope with the riot of competing colours, he settled for turning himself green with lots of spots.

One day, it seemed that Bodiecia must have ventured too far afield. Perhaps she got fed up with the noise, dust and banging and went off to look for a better tree. Unfortunately there wasn’t one within a muezzin’s call of the riad, and we never learned what became of her.

I had plenty of other humans for company too, in Sandy’s absence. Amanda, our expat friend, was finally having a housewarming, now that Hamza had finished work on her dar. The last time I saw it, the walls had been completely stripped and were
being
rendered with
haarsh
. Piles of lime and sand were heaped everywhere, and dust was thick in the air. Now the dar looked delightful. It was a small house on three levels, with five bedrooms and three bathrooms. Of the original features, there remained only the gallery balustrade, some exposed beams, and the
zellij
in a couple of rooms. Everything else was new, but in keeping with the style of the house. The work had taken the best part of a year and gone way over budget, but the result was wonderful.

Hamza and Frida were at the housewarming too. I hadn’t seen either of them since the day Hamza left our riad in high dudgeon. Knowing they had financial problems due to not being able to open their guesthouse, I hadn’t wanted to further trouble them by asking for the money we were owed. But now it seemed that things were finally going their way. They had been granted a guesthouse permit.

‘So Suzanna,’ Hamza said teasingly, ‘you’ve been fighting with everybody.’

I admired the way he was able to turn himself into ‘everybody’. I just shook my head and smiled and congratulated him on his permit. He and Frida were about to leave for Europe, and by the end of the evening we’d all agreed to get together when they returned.

A couple of months later, I received two thousand dirhams from Hamza. But I didn’t take up his offer to get his carpenter to finish the work – Noureddine was doing a much better job.

ABDUL RAHIM FINALLY
turned up to do the
halka
, which was a huge relief, but instead of the team I thought I was getting, he had only an apprentice to help out, and needed Mustapha’s men to assist with the heavy beams. This was annoying, as they were supposed to be finishing the downstairs salon.

I now had two carpenters onsite, both needing new wood – three thousand dirhams’ worth, to be exact. Until now I had bought second-hand wood and had it remilled, or got the decapo ladies to strip it, but the
halka
required longer lengths and a more consistent quality than recycled wood offered.

I rustled up the money, which was no mean feat as it was also payday. I even gave Si Mohamed and Abdul Rahim an extra five hundred dirhams in case it turned out to be more. I couldn’t go with them to buy the wood since I had to go to the
baladiya
to renew our
roqsa
.

While I was there, Si Mohamed called to say that Abdul Rahim had chosen some beautiful wood. ‘It will cost seven thousand dirhams,’ he said.

‘Wait right there,’ I said, and found a taxi and headed for the wood shop in Bab Guissa.

As I suspected, Abdul Rahim had picked the very best quality wood – and who could blame him? It was just a pity I didn’t have bottomless pockets. I asked to see the second quality and was shown pieces with splits in them. Were there longer ones that could be cut down? I persisted. Going through the pile, we managed to choose pieces that were still beautiful but had a few knots and lines here and there.

But at the end of it, the bill had been reduced by only a thousand dirhams. The price of wood seemed to fluctuate from week to week, depending on the supply, and this week, second-quality wood was a little over nine thousand dirhams per cubic metre.

I then proceeded to drive the woman in the shop crazy by checking her figures with a calculator. I rang other expats to see what they had paid, until the woman was ready to brain me. Eventually I paid. It hurt but I did it.

Afterwards, I wished I had bought the first-quality wood. In Australian terms, the price difference was negligible, but here it was huge. And there were so many other things to pay for.

Later that afternoon, I found myself four hundred dirhams short for the wages and had to borrow from Si Mohamed to make up the difference. He didn’t hesitate when I asked him. I loved that about my Moroccan workers and friends – they would do
anything
to help. Still, the notion of a Moroccan worker lending money to a Western boss must have amused him.

It seemed to be my day for unexpected expenses. In order to renew the
roqsa
, a document was needed from our engineer certifying that she took legal responsibility for the safety of the riad’s structure while the
halka
and catwalk were being built. I went to Zina’s office in the Ville Nouvelle, where she told me her fee for the document was four thousand dirhams. This was a special price, I should understand, because I was her client.

My mouth opened and I gulped a couple of times. Six hundred dollars for a single piece of paper? Rachid hadn’t charged me an additional centime for his
attestation
document.

‘For a private residence?’ I queried.

She changed the figure she’d scribbled in front of her to three thousand dirhams. ‘I must pay insurance, you know. It’s my risk, not Rachid Haloui’s.’

What she means, I thought, is that if the house falls down I can sue her insurance company. To whom she’d have to pay premiums anyway. I nodded, smiling with as much grace as I could muster, chatted on for a few moments about the house, then took my expensive piece of paper and left. Not a bad salary for five minutes’ work.

Back at the
baladiya
, I found that, naturally, Zina’s document wasn’t enough, and I had to send her a registered letter informing her that work had started on the riad. As this was my second
roqsa
and she’d already been working for me for two months, this seemed just a trifle absurd. But I went dutifully to the post office
with
the letter, then paid a further two hundred and fifty dirhams at the
baladiya
and was handed a new permit. It had that day’s date on it, rather than starting when the existing permit expired, as I’d requested. This meant I was being shortchanged by three weeks.