A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (7 page)

The first of the rooms, the cooler of the two, was the domain of mothers and small children, while the inner sanctum was for young, unmarried and older women. We chose a spot in the first room, in a small alcove upstream from everyone else, and Khadija left Ayoub with me while she went to fill the plastic buckets.

The contrast between the traditional modesty of Moroccan women in public and the relaxed intimacy of the
hammam
was startling. I could see cellulite, flabby breasts, bodies of all shapes, sizes and skin tones. (Many Moroccan women seemed to take particular care with their eyebrows, plucking them to a beautiful arch, perhaps because, with limbs and heads covered up on the street, eyebrows became a more distinguishing feature.) They kept their underpants on, but chatted as they lathered themselves, each other and their children. There were a few cries when shampoo got into small eyes, but mostly the children seemed to relish the attention. One little girl sat in a red bucket bigger than she was, her legs dangling over the edge.

Through the archway, I glimpsed Khadija mixing water from the fountains of hot and cold gushing out of the wall. Satisfied she had the temperature right, she slid the buckets across the floor, settling down next to us. We proceeded to soap up with a soft,
translucent
brown substance that resembled axle grease but which was soap made from olive oil. Taking a rough black mitt, Khadija scrubbed herself, then a squirming Ayoub, and finally me. It felt like being licked by a mother cat.

We had dressed and were about to leave when an argument broke out between two women in the first room. It quickly escalated into a shouting match, with others joining in. The two protagonists had their faces close together, hands shoving one another’s chest. The shouting, jostling and anger raged for several minutes. I longed to know what it was about. Jealousy over a man? A friendship betrayed? An agreement broken? But Khadija just shrugged her shoulders. Perhaps, I thought, when there is no concept of private space, as was the case in Morocco, in public is as good a place as any to express frustrations.

Walking back with a towel over my wet hair and Ayoub racing happily ahead, trying to join in the big boys’ game of street soccer, I felt relaxed and at peace. Communal bathing is a lovely tradition. I was almost going to tell Khadija about the saunas Sandy and I had with friends every Sunday night, but thought she might be shocked that they included both men and women. She and I had managed to develop a reasonable communication, with me speaking in simple French and Khadija replying in a mixture of French and Darija. If the subject was not too complex we seemed to understand one another, but we were far from being able to have an abstract discussion about the very different lives of women in our respective countries.

I WOKE ON
Monday morning and lay staring at the walls of my hotel room, mulling over the problem of proving my ownership of the house. The thought of being stuck in the hotel until the scribe returned from holidays was not a happy one, but I couldn’t see an alternative.

At nine o’clock I went to meet Larbi at the utilities office. There was a crush of customers fighting to pay their accounts – no standing in line, just dozens of people trying to attract attention by waving their bills and shouting at bureaucrats who went about their business with bored expressions, studiously ignoring the mêlée. This could take hours, I thought. We were at the back of the crowd and I knew I was never going to get used to the Moroccan method of elbowing one’s way through with brute force.

Larbi, however, had no such qualms and joined in the shouting, calling to someone he knew behind the counter. A man
sauntered
over and Larbi explained my predicament. Then, translating to me, he confirmed what I’d been told on Friday – it wasn’t possible to officially reconnect the water without the paperwork.

Bugger.

‘But he has also told me how to turn the water on in the meantime,’ Larbi continued. ‘You just need a plumber.’

Hallelujah.

Back in the Medina we found a plumber’s shop. Larbi had a few words with the elderly, bow-legged proprietor, and after collecting a spanner the man waddled with us to the riad, where we went around to the back door. To one side was a small metal flap I hadn’t noticed before. The plumber lifted this, gave a few twists of his spanner, and, miracle of miracles, the sound of running taps could be heard through the house.

‘Yahoo,’ I yelled loudly, to the amusement of Larbi and the plumber. I raced from room to room, turning off the water that was spilling all over the tiled floors.

I paid the plumber generously for his ten well-spent minutes and he left a happy man. Realising that now was a good moment, Larbi asked again about payment for the ghost guardian. I was feeling so buoyed that I almost paid him without fuss, but something held me back. If there had been a guardian why hadn’t he told Larbi there was no water in the house? How could he have lived there for two months without any water or a working toilet? It was beyond belief that there’d be no give-away smell of pee in the courtyard, as I knew it hadn’t rained at all during that period.

Then there were the letters I’d found piled against the front
door
, as though it hadn’t been opened in a long time. There was no sign of footprints or a mattress in the thick dust that coated the floors. And there was one final, irrefutable piece of evidence. Khadija, I had discovered, was an extremely curious neighbour, yet she had never seen this guardian. Not once.

By way of reply I requested the guardian’s telephone number. Larbi declined, saying I should pay him instead. I said there were some questions I wanted answered and I needed a translator as my French was so poor. It would have to wait until David returned.

Larbi departed and I knocked on Khadija’s door to tell her I had water. Leaving her in the riad to begin cleaning up the dust, Abdul and I went back to the Ville Nouvelle for the toilet. I also bought a small hand-basin, a tap, and a hose for washing one’s bits. A small delivery van drove the goods and Abdul to R’Cif, but there wasn’t enough room for me so I followed in a taxi. When I arrived Abdul had already organised a donkey to transport the stuff to the house. The sight of my fancy French loo riding on top of the donkey was surreal. The only thing weirder would have been someone sitting on it.

Khadija had done an amazing job of sweeping and mopping the entire downstairs, and Riad Zany was finally beginning to look cared for. The toilet unloaded, Abdul and I returned to the plumber’s shop, then accompanied him to the hardware store to buy the fittings he needed to install the unit. The hardware shop was a hole in the wall, piled to the ceiling with everything from locks and screws to rope and wire, bags of cement and tools. The plumber reeled off his requirements and the shop assistant ran up
and
down a ladder fetching them. It was a world away from the hardware megamarkets that proliferated at home, where you could spend an hour traipsing up and down aisles searching for what you needed, and even more time finding someone to help you.

To my great relief, the plumber began work the following day. His first concern was that he might damage the beautiful
zellij
in the tiny bathroom. I was reassured that he cared about this, but my need for the toilet was greater than my aesthetic sensibilities at this point and so I shrugged and said I would get it redone. By the end of the day I had a functioning hand basin and tap. Things seemed to be progressing well and I felt confident the work would be completed next day.

But as usual, I hadn’t allowed for the unexpected. On Tuesday, Abdul, who was lending a hand to dig out the old toilet, gave a cry of exasperation. He had dug down to the point where they hoped to connect the new pipe to the old, and there was no old pipe at all.

I didn’t understand why this was such a problem. Why couldn’t they just keep digging and reconnect with the sewer? At the limits of his second language, Abdul went to fetch the owner of a local restaurant, who spoke better French.

The restaurateur explained that the sewerage in Fez was the oldest functioning system in the world. When our house had been built centuries earlier a trench system lined with tiles was used, instead of pipes. Over the years the trench had narrowed and collapsed in places, so that now only a trickle of water could pass through to the main sewer line in the street outside. The trench
was
not nearly wide enough to allow the rush of water generated by a modern toilet.

It seemed the only solution was to widen the trench. Unfortunately, this ran out to the sewer line right under my front stairs, and digging them up would mean losing all the complex tile work.

Disappointed at the thought of several more days in the hotel, I left them to it and went and had a cup of mint tea with Khadija. It was the first time I had been in her kitchen, which was incredibly dark and dingy and was shared with three other families. She told me they’d been living in the house for five years and paid six hundred dirhams a month in rent, about ninety dollars. As they earned so little, it must have been a bit of a stretch.

Then she hit me with it. Trembling with nervousness, she asked if she, Abdul and Ayoub could move into my house when I went back to Australia.

From her point of view it must have seemed perfectly logical. Here was this big empty house across the alley, and while she was cleaning she must have daydreamed about living there. In some ways it was a good solution to let them stay, as I needed to find a house minder – the problem would lie in getting them to move again when Sandy and I returned. I’d been warned numerous times that if people decided they wanted to stay, it was very difficult under Moroccan law to get them out.

Suddenly I understood why her relatives had been trooping through the riad in the past couple of days, checking out the place. While the cleaning and bathroom work had been going on, numerous aunts, sisters and their children had appeared, wanting
to
look around. I suspected that my plane would hardly have left the tarmac before there’d be about nine of them living there.

I felt awful shattering her dream. I said gently that it was very nice of her to offer but I had made other arrangements. She kissed me and said she understood, but I could see she was disappointed.

For the rest of the day I carried an uncomfortable sense of guilt. I was so much wealthier than my neighbours, and Khadija had started calling me Madame Suzanna, which made me feel strange. From her perspective, it defined the social difference between us, and although I protested she persisted.

Something else I found disturbing was dealing with beggars. There is little social welfare in Morocco, so the unemployed, the disabled, divorced or widowed women, the latter usually with children and no job skills, are often left without an income. While I frequently gave money to beggars, it wasn’t feasible to give to everyone who asked, and selecting who was most deserving could be difficult. Once, having just given to an old lady with a goitre problem and a man with no arms or legs, I was accosted outside my riad door by a man holding a sleeping child. He said he wanted money to buy milk for her. As I was about to give him some, he told me he needed seven euros, claiming that was the cost of the milk.

Really? A couple of dirhams was more like it. A vision of him appearing at my door every time I opened it flashed into my head, so I told him no, then felt tremendously guilty for hours afterwards. I knew that Moroccans deal with situations where
they
choose not to give by saying, ‘May Allah make it easy on you.’ It was a phrase I needed to learn how to say.

Deciding to take a positive approach and check out of the hotel, I packed up my belongings and moved to the riad, where my optimism was rewarded. Abdul had managed to widen the trench sufficiently without digging up the stairs after all. The plumber spent the morning fiddling with the insides of the toilet and the pipes, and around eleven o’clock I heard the sweetest sound in the world – my toilet flushing for the first time. Before that moment, if you’d told me that such a noise would produce a rush of pure ecstasy, I’d have said you were bonkers.