A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (34 page)

We were taken up a further flight of stairs and ushered into a large room ringed with brocade-covered banquettes. There was no one in it, apart from three teenage boys mucking around with a makeshift sound system. Moments later it burst into life. The music was electronic Arab pop, cranked up so far past distortion point it hurt my ears. How was I going to stand several hours of this?

Ayisha, quite prepared to make her own party, began dancing around the room in a hip-gyrating, smouldering kind of way. With a lack of available men to make eye contact with, she focused on Sandy and me alternately. She may not have ever actually seduced anyone, but it didn’t stop her practising.

A short time later, Ayisha’s mother appeared and sat close by, engaged in a cosy chat with her neighbour. During a break in the music Ayisha told me they were discussing her latest prospective husband – a young man from Casablanca on whom Ayisha wasn’t keen. Watching the provocative way she danced, it was no
wonder
her parents were keen to marry her off as quickly as possible. She was an explosion waiting to happen.

Slowly other guests drifted in, until there were about thirty women and fifteen children. But no men. Sandy, meanwhile, had been sitting next to me making funny observations about the guests. When a young woman in a long blue dress also began to dance in an overtly sexual way on the other side of the room, Sandy and I exchanged glances. She shook her hips and shimmied her shoulders, then tied a scarf over her bottom and began to wiggle frantically. The way she swung her long hair from side to side would have made a 1960s go-go dancer envious.

Encouraged by this display, women young and old began to rise from the banquettes and join in. The little girls copied their older sisters, and soon the entire room was a gyrating mass of women, bumping pelvises, holding hands, openly flirting with one another. There was a palpable sense of sexuality in the air. Sandy’s eyes were on sticks. So, I thought, this is how Moroccan women party when they get together.

Ayisha’s aunt, a plump, jolly woman with a friendly face, got me up to dance with her. Unfamiliar with the music and the rhythms, I tried my best to wiggle along, but it felt odd and unnatural, and my efforts were more like someone having a seizure than a sexy temptress.

It wasn’t until around one in the morning, just before the food was served, that Ayisha decided it was time for Sandy to join the men. He was hustled to an apartment in a building across the road, where a group of men had been chanting Koranic verses
since
sunset. Eventually they blessed a teapot, and Sandy felt hopeful of some liquid refreshment at least. But when the contents were poured it turned out to be room-temperature milk. He had missed dinner, as the men had naturally been served before the women. After another hour or so, they were each given a single date to eat. Well, it was almost Ramadan.

There was more chanting, then the lights in the apartment went out. Was it a power failure? No, the tempo of the chanting increased and the men stood up and started to throw their heads around in a similar fashion to the women. Then the lights came back on, and everyone sat down and listened to a long sermon, musing philosophically about where Allah could be found in the electric current. Riveting stuff.

The austerity of the men’s party was remarkable, compared to the hedonism of the women’s. The only ritualised thing the women did was go up and admire the baby at some point in the evening, and slip the mother some money. This was shortly before the food arrived – platters of lamb and prune tagine, and whole chickens with olives. After dinner, when the tables were cleared away, the dancing began again.

The particularly uninhibited dancer in blue came over and took my hand, pulling me onto the dancefloor. Someone passed over the scarf of honour, which was tied around my bottom, and I tried my best to emulate the pelvic thrusting and shaking that my partner was doing so effortlessly. The other women started to clap, and for a few brief embarrassing moments, my bottom became the centre of attention.

Ayisha danced over and began trying to draw my attention away from the girl in blue.

‘Not like that,’ she shouted into my ear. ‘Like this.’ She demonstrated the elusive wiggle. After a few minutes of my trying to emulate her, she announced, ‘That’s enough,’ in a peevish voice, took my hand and led me to the other side of the room.

I felt like a small child, and could almost hear her thinking, She’s not your friend, she’s mine. I hadn’t been the object of female jealousy since school.

By this time, it was after two a.m. and I wanted to rescue Sandy and go home. But Ayisha was having a great old time and was in no mood to leave.

‘Not yet,’ she protested. ‘Not until after the pastries.’ But once the cakes had been distributed, she continued to dance, ignoring the increasingly glazed looks of her elders. Eventually her mother got up and started to the door. Ayisha followed to bring her back but I hemmed her in from the rear. With an impeccable sense of timing, Sandy met us on the stairs. Ayisha was outnumbered and we were finally able to make our escape.

Once Ramadan began, the streets were eerily quiet in the mornings as the city slept off the binge-eating of the night before. The skies were noticeably clearer without the daytime smoke from cooking fires. After a few days, people assumed a hollow-eyed, haunted look from inadequate sleep and no food or water during daylight. After a couple of weeks, they looked
like
faded photocopies of their former selves.

Night had turned into day. At sunset, after the cannon had sounded, came the call to prayer. This was the signal for everyone to hoe into a Ramadan breakfast of dates, milk and
harira
soup – lamb or vegetable stock with tomato paste, capsicum, chick peas, lentils, rice, small pasta and coriander. There were side dishes of hardboiled eggs with salt and cumin, and pancake-like breads. To finish, there were deep-fried pastries soaked in sugar syrup, and fruit juice and mint tea.

Between ten p.m. and midnight the ‘proper’ meal of the day was eaten – either a tagine or couscous or
b’stilla
, a kind of flaky pastry filled with minced pigeon or chicken and topped with, strangely, icing sugar. After this came sleep, then you woke at four a.m. for another breakfast, before going to sleep again. It was customary for street singers to walk the alleys in the small hours, waking people in a lyrical fashion to remind them to eat before dawn.

One sunset we had Ramadan breakfast with Si Mohamed and his family, and watched in admiration as he sat at the table, confronted by food, then as the call to prayer sounded disappeared to the mosque instead of slaking his thirst and hunger. His sisters restrained themselves until their mother had finished her prayers and Si Mohamed returned. We all said a thankful ‘
Bismillah
’ before tucking in.

It was hard for the manual labourers during Ramadan. At the riad, the pace of work slacked off noticeably in the afternoons, so we cut the working day by an hour. And tempers frayed more easily. A neighbour appeared one morning complaining, not for the
first
time, that we had knocked plaster off his wall with our banging. I had already agreed to pay to repair the cracks, but now he said it was a matter of urgency that this was done before
Eid al-Fitr
, the feast at the end of Ramadan, which has as much significance in Muslim countries as Christmas does in Western ones. I told him I would send our plasterer around to fix the damage the following Saturday. As the plasterer was working flat out to finish our place before Sandy’s daughter Yvonne and her family arrived, this was some sacrifice.

A few moments later, I was surprised to hear raised voices from upstairs. I took the stairs two at a time to find this same neighbour surrounded by our angry workmen. It turned out that instead of just taking my word, the neighbour had found it necessary to go up and declare to the plasterer, ‘Suzanna says you have to come and work at my place on Saturday.’

As I hadn’t yet spoken to the plasterer about this, he was understandably put out and an argument ensued, during which, a shocked Si Mohamed told me later, the neighbour used Allah’s name as a swear word. All the workers were outraged and downed tools. The plasterer flat-out refused to work for the neighbour at all. I attempted to mediate a situation that was threatening to take on the dimensions of the Danish cartoon crisis.

I bundled the neighbour downstairs and said that if our plasterer would not work for him then he needed to find another one, but I would pay only as much as ours quoted for the job. The neighbour scurried off to find one, and for hours afterwards I could hear the indignant tones of the men upstairs as they
discussed
the failings of the neighbour. Who needed
Neighbours
or
The Sopranos
when you had a real-life soap opera?

For months now, whenever people asked when the house would be finished, I’d been saying three weeks. Now here we were with just weeks left and there were some things we clearly couldn’t manage this time round – taking the roof off the
massreiya
and repairing the carved and painted ceiling, for one. This was a job that couldn’t be rushed, and we figured that since it had been there for several centuries, it could hang on until the following year.

Inevitably, as we got closer to the end, events conspired against us. Part of the ceiling in the downstairs toilet collapsed while Mustapha was repairing it. Fortunately he wasn’t standing under it at the time, but fixing it required digging up some of the stairs and was a major job.

At no point did getting the plumber to finish his work become any easier. He continued to show up at strange times, when Si Mohamed was not around to translate and the shops were shut, so he was unable to buy the parts he needed. He seemed incapable of thinking ahead, so I pinned him down and got him to make a list of everything he needed to complete the job and asked him to buy them. He refused, saying Si Mohamed should do this, which meant that half of the items were not the right ones and had to be exchanged – more wasted time.

When he’d fiddled with one of the toilets for the third or
fourth
time, unable to fix it, I told him to finish the rest of the work first.

‘But where are the parts for the hand basin?’ he asked me.

‘I presume they were on the list that
you
made, so you must now have them.’

He wandered off. A while later, we were thrilled to discover that the hand basin was connected. No more running across the courtyard to wash our hands. We stood and watched with satisfaction as the water swirled down the plughole.

Doing the dishes later that evening, I pulled the plug out to empty the sink and there was a gush of water from the cupboard beneath, soaking my feet and the floor. Opening the cupboard door, I saw that the parts connecting the sink to the pipe had been removed. Well, that explained why our hand basin now worked.

At least the catwalk was almost complete. Our relationship with the temperamental master carpenter Abdul Rahim might have begun badly, but our respect for him had grown. We’d been surprised when he turned up to do the catwalk himself, instead of sending an apprentice, and were even more amazed when he stuck with it, turning up day after day and doing an excellent job. We found out that his previous employers, French people, had sacked him, which was why we had the privilege of his services.

As he had only given us a quote for the structure, I asked how much he wanted to do the decorative facing, a job of a couple of days, and he gave me a price equivalent to more than half the total cost of the catwalk, which I declined. When the work was very nearly finished I looked up to see him putting
a
straight piece of wood along the top of the catwalk roof. I had been told that when you use traditional, handmade green tiles, as we planned to, a special piece of scalloped wood must be put in place to contain them. But when I asked Abdul Rahim about this he grew irritated, saying if we wanted it done the traditional way we’d have to pay extra.

‘It’s a piece of decoration,’ he explained.