A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (33 page)

These dwellings, large or small, inhabited by rich and poor were designed and built, not for the requirements of a husband, wife and children, childless couples, the aged whose families have left home, or even for individuals but as centres of family life to house the entire extant hierarchy of a family comprehending several generations. There is no word for ‘home’ in the Muslim vocabulary and in Morocco the nearest approach to it is
wakr
, which is almost exclusively used to describe the lair of a wild beast.

A typical Fasi house is an irregular quadrilateral, built of mud bricks and clay, the same material that was used to build so much else in Fez from walls to mosques. If there are any windows opening outwards onto the street they are high up and covered with wood or iron gratings. The only embellishment on these outer walls will probably be the hand of Fatimah, the Prophet’s daughter, delineated in hen’s blood, to ward off evil.

In such a house the courtyard is surrounded with a sort of cloister in which columns, which may be partly tiled, partly decorated with plasterwork, support richly encrusted arches. In the centre there is usually a fountain with a tile or marble surround into which water splashes soothingly. In the courtyard there may also be orange trees, vines and figs. On the upper floors long, lofty rooms, some of them bedrooms, surround the well of the courtyard and look down on it.

The roof, surrounded by walls and trellises, is the retreat of the women of the house, from which they can look out over the city and down into it without themselves being seen. Like all Moroccans the Fasi use the rooms on the upper floors of their houses in winter, the lower ones in summer. Then during the hot nights the inner court collects the cooler air which descends into it; by day the stifling heated air flows across the mouth of it, leaving the lower floors and the courtyard cool.

Such a house, although it appears to be inextricably locked together with its neighbours, is not. There are no communal stairs. Each windowless, walled dwelling that goes to make up the mass is completely cut off from its neighbour, without any possibility of being overlooked, except perhaps from the roof. Each one is essentially a sanctuary, demonstrating as well as anything material can the essential duality of Islam. The huddle of houses displays the unity of all within Islam, the walled sanctuary, the place where the head of the family is its
imam
and in which his person, and those of his family, are intensely private, inviolable,
harām
, forbidden to others, as inviolable as the Zawiya, the shrine of Moulay Idriss II. Some say that he was the founder of Old Fez in 809, others that it was founded by his father. Together with the tomb of his son, the mausoleum of Idriss I is the most venerated shrine in Morocco.

The alleys surrounding the Zawiya are packed with Fasi and pilgrims from the furthest parts of Morocco, all of whom come to obtain a
baraka
, the Saint’s blessing. They are also crowded with beggars who crouch against its outer walls, demanding alms ‘For God and my Lord Idriss!’

Such beggars, men and women, are said in Islam to ‘Stand at God’s door’, and what they receive is described as being ‘God’s due’. For those who appear reluctant to give them this due, a familiar prayer is ‘May God give thee something to give!’ To which the hard-of-heart or the penniless may reply, but rarely do, so close to the shrine, ‘God open the way for us and thee to prosperity!’

The main road to Cetinje by way of the Lovcen Pass was a wild one even by Montenegrin standards; lined with ruined forts, it climbed through plantations of oak and pine ravaged by fires that had only recently swept the mountainside. It was loosely metalled, full of potholes, had twenty-four major hairpin bends on it and was only one vehicle wide, with lay-bys. Its outside edge frequently overhung precipices and at some places gaps in the masonry, as they did in so many places on the Adriatic Highway, showed where vehicles had been driven clean through the protecting walls taking the occupants on what had been, presumably, a spectacular exit to eternity.

Our ascent of it was made more difficult by a large caravan of picturesquely-clad gypsies who were descending it from the Pass in horse-drawn carts, on foot and with numbers of animals running loose along with them; but finally, having emerged from a tunnel that had been driven through one of the outlying spurs of the massif, we reached the Pass, which was literally white with sheep. Here the sky was threatening and a few drops of icy rain fell. Already old women in long, rusty black skirts and white-moustached men wearing little round black pill-box hats and waistcoats and what looked like baggy jodhpur breeches of heavy, brown homespun were urging the flocks and the cattle that had been grazing around the head of the Pass down to the little village of Njeguši in anticipation of the coming storm.

Just below this pass there was an inn, a
gostiona
, which is the Montenegrin way of spelling
gostilna
, where we stopped for a drink.

Inside it four men, one of them the proprietor who was in his shirtsleeves, were drinking the Albanian brandy called XTRA. All were drunk and beginning to be acrimonious. It was not a place to linger. The three customers had their vehicles parked outside, one of which was a large petrol tanker, and when we got up to go one of them, who turned out to be the driver of the tanker, easily identifiable by his overalls, got up, too, clutched one of the lapels of my coat in order to keep himself in an upright position and, swaying backwards and forwards on his feet like some Cornish rocking-stone, announced that he was about to drive his tanker down to Kotor by the road we had just climbed to the Lovcen Pass. How he was proposing to do this and remain alive was a mystery.

By the time we emerged from the
gostiona
the storm was directly overhead and for an instant a single, blinding flash of lightning turned the grey limestone of the mountain a dazzling white. It was followed by a single, deafening roll of thunder which reverberated among the rocks. Then an apocalyptical wind blew, bending the trees as if they were reeds. Then the heavens opened.

Thanking our lucky stars that tonight we would sleep in a Grand Hotel instead of in the back of a van unconverted for this purpose, which was what we had now been doing on and off for months, we set off downhill through the downpour into what, insofar as we could see anything at all, resembled a crater filled with twisted rocks, narrowly missing a head-on collision with a bus that was groaning up through the hairpin bends on its way to Njeguši, loaded with what we later discovered was part of the day shift of the ‘Obod’ factory in Cetinje which made refrigerators and other electrical appliances, the ‘Košuta’ footwear factory and the ‘Galenika’ factory for processing pharmaceutical preparations, all of whom would have been a serious loss to the economy.

By the time we reached the city it was completely dark and the rain that had been clouting down had given place to a monotonous drizzle; so dark that in a dimly-lit boulevard opposite what had once been the building occupied by the Italian diplomatic mission I ran over and killed a black cat which darted across the road in front of us. However, even this melancholy incident failed to dampen our spirits completely. For we were looking forward to staying the night at the hotel, which was not just any old hotel but the Grand Hotel of Vuko Vuketic, as it used to be known, otherwise known as the Lokanda, one of the last hotels of its kind in the Balkans: the Balkans strictly speaking being the mountains in Bulgaria that extend across the country from the Yugoslav border to the Black Sea: but in the sense in which I interpret it, the one in which it is commonly used, of the Balkan Peninsula, the lands between the Adriatic and the Black Sea.

I had last stayed in it in the 1960s. I remembered it as a rather splendid cream- and yellow-coloured building with a sort of semi-circular foyer that was a bit like a Victorian greenhouse. Originally built in 1864, it was the first hotel to be constructed in Cetinje and to it were sent the official and honoured guests of what was then the Montenegrin capital, which even in its heyday never had more than 5000 inhabitants. (Now it had more than 10,000 inhabitants and had several large factories producing, as well as electrical appliances, shoes, pharmaceutical products and white bauxite.) At one time the hotel housed the United States diplomatic mission. Reconstructed in 1900, and enlarged in 1929, it had two restaurants and forty bedrooms. In its remarkable foyer and in other public rooms, all rather dingy when I was last there, tall old men in national costumes with huge white moustaches, some, almost unbelievably, still with Lugers and Mausers and other weapons stuck in their cummerbunds, sat sipping away at their
rakijas
, their Albanian XTRA brandies and various other strong drinks for hours on end while remembering old blood feuds, an activity which in Montenegro had been raised to an art form. In fact one visitor, the author of the excellent
Companion Guide to Jugoslavia
, J. A. Cuddon, records one of these Montenegrin mountaineers taking out his pistol and shooting a mad dog in one of the dining rooms.

The hotel stood in what had been a windswept square when I was last there, for although it was already spring down on the Adriatic, 2100 or so feet below, up here at Cetinje, which is invariably snowed up for five months of the year from October until the end of February, there was still snow on the ground.

Now, on this really foul, wet night, we looked forward to the hot baths which could usually be had in it, sometimes to the accompaniment of alarming clanking noises from the plumbing system; to the big drinks, the scalding hot lamb soup we planned on ordering, and the great gobbets of Montenegrin pork, all brought to the table by ancient servitors; and after that to retiring to bed in one of the large and shabby but clean bedrooms. All things I remembered about the hotel with pleasure from my previous visit and of which I had spoken enthusiastically and perhaps too frequently to my fellow traveller. I could even remember the way to it, through little streets lined with lime and black locust trees, the latter a form of acacia.

By the time we reached the square in the centre of the town in which the hotel stood a thick mist had descended on it and as it was ill-lit I got down and set off on foot to look for it, leaving Wanda in the vehicle.

There, at the southern end of the square in which I remembered it as standing, I was confronted with what looked like an enormous pancake but on closer inspection turned out to be a mound of yellowish rubble. There was no sign of the hotel.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to a passerby who had halted, curious at my interest in a heap of rubble, speaking in Italian, which sometimes serves in these parts of the world. ‘Do you happen to speak Italian?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Can you please tell me the way to the Grand Hotel?’

‘Grand Hotel,’ he said. ‘That is the Grand Hotel,’ pointing at the mound of bricks and plaster.

‘But what happened?’ I asked.

‘It was the earthquake,’ he said. ‘The great earthquake of 1979. It destroyed not only the Grand Hotel. It also damaged and destroyed a large part of the city.’

‘Is there another hotel?’ I asked him, remembering that back in the sixties although the Grand Hotel had been the only one of any consequence in Cetinje, there had been some talk of another hotel, although whether it was built or about to be built I could no longer recall.

‘No,’ he said, ‘there is no other hotel. The Grand Hotel was the only one. Tourists are no longer allowed to stay in the town. In fact there is no longer even a Tourist Office.’

In spite of the drizzle and the fog it was the hour of the
passeggiata
in the main street, which although many of its buildings had been badly damaged was either being rebuilt or had already been built in their original, old-fashioned form.

Young, tall, dark and incredibly handsome men, moustache-less and pistol-less, and equally beautiful girls wearing jeans and as upright as if they had been brought up to carry pots and heavy weights on their heads, as they probably had, walked up and down in little bands past the lighted shop fronts of the pleasant, pale-coloured buildings I remembered, talking animatedly, smoking cigarettes like chimneys and eyeing one another. Apart from the two of us there was not a tourist in sight and the Tourist Office, as my informant had already told me, was closed, with a notice in the window to that effect.

We dined well on the sort of huge pieces of pork we would have been offered at the Grand Hotel if only it had remained standing, quantities of bread – there were no vegetables of any kind on offer – a delicious pastry stuffed with figs, a sort of baklava, but softer than the Greek variety, and drank copiously of a robust red wine of the region called Vranac Plavka in an effort to banish the thought of another night in the open, in a restaurant which resembled a brick-lined
bier-keller
, except that it was on the ground floor. The waiters, who were all well over six feet tall, wore white shirts and black trousers and black waistcoats. Male guests drank oceans of beer straight out of the bottles, spurning glasses; and old men of the sort I remembered with moustaches like racing bicycle handlebars kissed one another before settling down, as I had remembered them doing, to speak nostalgically, according to Wanda who could understand some of what they said, of what had been until quite recently an almost unbelievably violent past.

‘He who revenges himself is blessed,’ was one of the dicta of family life in a country where male children used to have loaded firearms placed in their hands before they could even stand on their two feet, let alone fire them, in order to prepare them to be good Montenegrins, worthy members of the only Balkan State that was never subdued by the Turks. For Montenegro, until the Second World War, was a man’s country in which a woman’s lot was to perform menial tasks such as agriculture, beget as many male children as possible to make up for the constant death roll among the men, and attend the funerals of their lords and masters when they failed to survive a
ceta
, one of the predatory raids they spent so much of their time either planning or taking part in. The results of such expeditions were subsequently recorded for posterity by
guslari
, minstrels, many of them blind, who used to accompany their recitals of these bloody doings on the
guslar
, a one-stringed instrument rather like a lute, made of wood, or clay, or copper, sometimes even of stone. Some of the ballads, which the
guslari
knew by heart, were anything up to seventy thousand words long and are still recited today in some parts of what is the smallest Yugoslavian republic. Now these feudal practices were ostensibly no more in Cetinje.