Read A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco Online

Authors: Suzanna Clarke

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #House & Home, #Travel, #Essays & Travelogues

A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (5 page)

BOOK: A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco
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‘No idea,’ he shrugged, struggling to focus through his feverish haze.

Just when we needed him, Nabil had disappeared with Larbi to have a look at the house, so we could only guess, and wait.

Down in the tiled courtyard, two sheep waited their fate at
Eid al-Kbir
, the Feast of the Sacrifice, in three days’ time. Callously I hoped that their blood wouldn’t stain our tiles. In the orange tree just outside the window, small birds hopped about, chirping in the cool winter sunshine.

Nabil returned. The scribe was still shouting at the old man. ‘Can you find out what the problem is?’ I urged.

He listened for a moment and then shrugged. ‘He’s just telling him he needs to pay his back taxes before the sale can go through.’

That sounded harmless enough. I breathed a sigh of relief. At this point I would have paid the taxes for him.

Finally the scribe began to read a description of the property, which might have been a verse or two of
A Thousand and One Nights
for all our knowledge of Darija. Nabil didn’t translate, but simply inclined his head. When the scribe had finished intoning there was a pause, and he turned his gaze expectantly to us.

‘Please tell the owner,’ I told Nabil firmly, ‘that we’re buying the house as is and nothing must be removed.’ We’d met expats in the Medina who’d had windows and doors stripped by the owners after the completion of sale. These items fetched big money on the
antique
markets of Paris and London, and we knew that the ceiling in the
massreiya
alone was worth more than the entire house.

When my instruction was translated the old man looked pained. ‘Tell her,’ came the translation, ‘that if you find something embellished, then it won’t be unembellished.’

The issue of vanishing artefacts was a pervasive one. A friend of David’s had recently bought a magnificent domed ceiling for his Fez house from an antique shop in Rabat. The workman installing it recognised it as one stolen from a house two doors down a few months before. The police were told, and the antique shop had to give the money back and pay for the reinstallation in the original house.

But many inhabitants of the Medina had little else to sell but their doors and windows, so why put artefacts before welfare? David’s argument was that destruction of cultural heritage was short-sighted, and far greater numbers would be employed by tourism in the long run.

It struck me that for people living in a city more than a thousand years old, their lifespan represented a brief flash. It was for their descendants’ sake that things needed to be preserved, but how do you deny anyone the right to modernise? Must they sacrifice their aspirations for the new because they live in an historically significant city?

After the signing, which for the old couple amounted to a thumb pressed into a red stamp pad and then onto the paper, Sandy, Nabil and I unburdened our pockets of the bundles of dirhams and handed them to the scribe. He counted the notes,
then
his off sider counted them again before handing them to the blind owner. As the pile of money in the old man’s lap grew, so did his smile.

‘It’s the most money he will ever have in his life,’ Nabil said. ‘And it’s the last time he will see it.’ The couple were buying an apartment in the Ville Nouvelle and were looking forward to a bright, shiny new place where everything worked. No doubt they thought us deluded for wanting to buy their decrepit old house. I must confess that the same thought had crossed my own mind.

The mediaeval transaction finally done, a jug and glasses appeared. ‘Great,’ said Sandy, shivering with a temperature. ‘A hot drink.’

Actually, no. We toasted our new house with cold almond milk and cookies.

‘The owner wants to know where you come from,’ Nabil said, and when I told him the old man repeated the name with wonder. It was as though a pair of Martians had dropped in to buy his house.

The old couple weren’t due to move out for six months, and when the time came to pay the second half of the purchase price, it inevitably proved more complicated than we anticipated. Back in Australia, we opened our Moroccan cheque book, which we hadn’t looked at since receiving it from the bank, and realised we had a problem. We stared at the incomprehensible Arabic, and the more we stared, the more confused we were about what went where.

Then it occurred to us that we knew one Moroccan who lived in Brisbane, but it transpired that he had left Morocco before he was old enough to have a cheque book, and he was equally in the dark. ‘My brother back in Morocco is a notary,’ our friend said. ‘I could ask him.’

I scanned a blank cheque and emailed it to our friend to forward to his brother. Instructions were eventually conveyed to us and I made the cheque out to the vendors. I posted it to Nabil and sent another letter to the bank manager in Fez, along with a photo of the old couple so that he could identify them and pay them the cash.

As we had requested the vendors move out before the rest of the money was handed over, Larbi offered to organise a guardian to live in the house until I could return. At a cost of one thousand dirhams, the equivalent of about a hundred and fifty dollars, it seemed a good arrangement, especially since we didn’t want to risk losing the fabulous doors and ceiling.

I planned to go to Fez in August to begin the restoration. It was impossible for Sandy to get time off work then, but we would be returning together seven months later. This wasn’t ideal, but at least our dream house was finally becoming a reality.

‘We can call it Riad Zany,’ said Sandy. Zany was my childhood nickname, so I was touched. It wasn’t particularly Moroccan, but it seemed appropriate for this eccentric venture. I was under no illusions that the restoration would be straightforward, but with patience and determination I felt we would manage,
inshallah
.

THE FINAL LEG
of my journey that August, from Dubai to Morocco, felt endless. It was around midday when I landed in Casablanca, and there being no plane to Fez until eleven that evening, I took the train. It rolled through the sprawling suburbs of Casablanca to the dry and dusty fields beyond. In outlying villages modern, whitewashed villas with satellite dishes rubbed shoulders with huts made of palm fronds, where plastic plugged the worst of the holes. Impoverished farmers with a donkey or two and a few chooks were trying to eke out a living on patches of parched soil. Freshly turned fields appeared to be sprouting crops of plastic bags, which had blown on the wind and been ploughed in.

Then the land began to form into soft rounded shapes as the foothills of the Atlas began. Vineyards and olive groves flicked past the window, then at last I could see the outskirts of my adopted city, nestled beneath a foggy haze of wood smoke.

I took a taxi to the Medina, gazing with pleasure at the mass of humanity flowing around me. The natives of Fez – Fassis – looked mediaeval in their djellabas and headscarves, although the colourful clothing of Moroccan women gave them a visibility on the streets that was in stark contrast to the crow-black invisibility of their counterparts in Dubai.

I collapsed into my hotel bed as soon as I’d checked in, and by seven next morning I was at the Café Firdous opposite with a
nus-nus
(half espresso, half milk) and a croissant. Café culture in Morocco is traditionally male-only, but in recent times the locals have become accustomed to strange foreign women who see no shame in sitting on the street sipping coffee. I watched the men greet one another with ardent kisses on both cheeks and cries of ‘
Salaam Aleikum!
’ (Peace be with you!) To this came the response ‘
Aleikum Salaam!
’ (With you be peace!)

Breakfast done, I strolled around the Medina, waiting for a civilised hour to collect the keys to the house. My heart lifted at the sight of a man on a donkey coming in under the Bab Bou Jeloud. Ironically, this magnificent Islamic keyhole-shaped gate, the most photographed monument in Fez, was built in 1913 by the French, to give their troops direct access to the two main streets of the Medina. The Bab Bou Jeloud replaced a copy of the Arc de Triomphe, which the French had previously built on this spot. Realising the locals would view this as provocation, a subsequent colonial administrator had it torn down and replaced with something more culturally appropriate. The gate is blue on one side, the colour that represents Fez, and green on the other, the colour of Islam.

After buying a new card for my Moroccan mobile, I tried to call Nabil, only to get a message saying his line was ‘no longer open’. I rang his office and learnt he’d emigrated to Canada. David was unable to help, as he was in the United States. Braving it, I rang Larbi, who managed to understand my basic French and said he’d meet me at four that afternoon at the hotel. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just have my keys dropped off, but my French wasn’t good enough to argue.

In the meantime I decided to go to the house anyway and see if the guardian Larbi had hired was there. Pleased to find that my memory of the Medina was still intact, I made my way through the maze of streets to my new doorstep, knocked and waited. Then I knocked again, and kept knocking until my knuckles were sore. No one was there.

I was about to admit defeat when the door opposite opened and a plump young woman poked her head out. I introduced myself and explained I was looking for the guardian. She didn’t speak French, she told me in halting French, and began talking in Darija, gesturing me to come inside. I smiled, nodded and followed her up a set of stairs into a tiny flat, part of a dar. She told me her name was Khadija, ushered me into a chair and went off to make tea, returning with her son Ayoub, an adorable five-year-old with enormous black eyes and a mischievous manner.

Another two women came in and greeted me, kissing me once on each cheek then three times on my right cheek. They were Khadija’s sister and niece, and began telling me things in a mixture of Darija and French that I didn’t fully understand. I explained the situation
as
best I could, and Khadija’s brother-in-law was produced. He spoke much better French and insisted on ringing Larbi to see if he could come earlier. But the reply was still four o’clock.

My new friends invited me to stay, but not wishing to impose, I said I was going to take a walk in the Medina. Khadija wanted to come with me, but first she had to get ready. She spent a considerable amount of time changing, reappearing in a loose white suit with black pinstripes. Then she began, with great care, to apply her makeup. She made a fuss of doing her hair, and then covered it all with a scarf.

While she was getting ready I had a look around the room. Besides the banquettes – the long low Moroccan couches used for sitting on during the day and sleeping on at night – there was the ubiquitous television, and a display cabinet filled with photos, including one of Khadija at her wedding to a moustached fellow. Over the door was a photo of the Prophet’s tomb at Mecca, surrounded by pilgrims, and in every crevice of the room were vases of fake flowers.

Eventually we left. Out in the Medina many shops were shut, it being Friday, the holy day. Most of the streets were too narrow for us to walk abreast so I hung behind, but as we passed a small photo studio, Khadija slipped her arm through mine and told me she’d like a photo of us together. I was both flattered and amused. We had only just met but already she seemed to regard me as her close friend. Briefly I wondered if there was more to the gesture than friendship; I smiled but made a noncommittal reply.

We made our way to a part of the Medina I had never seen
before
, where I met Khadija’s brother, who was selling bunches of luscious grapes. He had a handsome face but opened his mouth to reveal a double row of rotting teeth. Tooth decay is rife in Morocco because of the amount of sugar people consume. Every glass of mint tea has about six sugar cubes in it and the locals drink it incessantly.

Khadija’s mother worked at another stall further down the street, and on being introduced promptly invited me to lunch.

We followed her to a tiny, three-room flat, stuffed with shabby furniture. The spaces between the furniture were taken up by women on their hands and knees washing the floor. I was ushered through into the lounge room and seated, then the women came through in succession for more greetings and kisses. For a few moments I felt like visiting royalty.

BOOK: A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco
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