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

by Suzanna Clarke

  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 p
erfectly 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.

  A week or so later, I passed by the hardware store and saw my old squat toilet for sale. I knew when I set it outside the front door that it would find a new home; something so useful would never be wasted in Morocco. Although I considered myself frugal, it reinforced how much more I squandered than my neighbours.

  Khadija arrived to help me unpack some new deliveries, including mattresses, and when everything was organised I paid her. This time, as she’d only done a couple of hours’ work, I gave her fifty dirhams. This was as much as Abdul got for an entire day as a parking attendant, yet I saw disappointment on her face, and realised I’d got the amount wrong with the initial payment I’d given her for the big clean.

  Once she’d left, I stood in the courtyard drinking it in. At last I was living in our house. I felt a rush of happiness bubble up. It was late afternoon, birds were singing in the citrus trees, and the light was golden on the wall. I went into the downstairs salon and gazed out at the fountain framed by the plasterwork arch, then wandered upstairs.

  Off the catwalk that joined the two main sections of the house, a set of stairs led to a tiny room whose purpose was a mystery. The ceiling above the passage was painted in geometric designs and on the end wall was Arabic script. When five-year-old Ayoub had visited he proudly announced that this read Allah Akbar (God is Great) and Bismillah (Praise be to God). Perhaps the room had been a place to pray in a busy household.

  In the massreiya I threw back the shutters and light flooded in. The radial design on the ceiling had been painted so long ago that the colours had faded to beautiful subtle tones. At that moment, not even the amount of work involved to fix the sagging on one side spoiled my appreciation of it.

  I looked at the date on the intricate band of plasterwork bordering the ceiling: it read 1292, the Muslim calendar year for the date of the last major restoration to the house. That converted to about 1875 in the Western calendar, and if the house had stood for that long without further maintenance, surely it would for a while longer. At least until we could fix it.

  That evening, I went out to eat in the Medina, returning after dark. It felt eerie being in the riad by myself. Before going to bed, I investigated all the rooms, shining a torch into every dark corner to reassure myself I wasn’t going to get any unpleasant surprises during the night. I had made the downstairs salon my bedroom, and as I lay down I found it comforting to hear muffled voices through the walls. I fell asleep to the buzz of mosquitoes and a persistent blowfly.

  I slept lightly, waking at the fall of a leaf from the lemon tree, and again when tomcats had a territorial stoush on the terrace. In the early morning I was roused by the sound of a mournful song, and a short time later came a muezzin’s call. This went on for half an hour, joined by competing chants from other mosques. Just as they finished a cool breeze drifted in, displacing the hot and heavy night air, and I slept well for a couple of hours.

  The next time I woke it was to the sound of my mobile phone. It was Sandy, who’d tried to call on three other occasions and got a Moroccan who spoke no English. Odd, given he’d dialled the same number each time. Sandy had just spent several weeks in Sydney, filling in for another radio presenter who’d quit unexpectedly. He was back at home now, with the cats curled up on his knee. I felt a rush of love for my small family. Some men might have felt resentful and paranoid at having their partner out of sight for so long. The truth was, I hadn’t met anyone in years who came close to touching my mind and my heart the way Sandy did. Nor was I looking to.

  Buoyed by my success with the small bathroom, I decided to get started on the fountain. It was quite a few years since it had done anything but collect leaves, and the roots of the trees on either side appeared to have interfered with the water pipes.

  I fetched the old plumber and immediately ran into communication difficulties again. As with the toilet, the problem with the fountain was greater than it looked, and understanding it required a translator. The restaurateur came to the rescue once more, explaining that the plumber was at the limit of his skills, and wasn’t about to start removing the beautiful zellij around the fountain.

  Zellij is like a jigsaw puzzle; the pieces are built up progressively into a pattern. You can’t simply take some out then easily repair it, and at the equivalent of thirty dollars a metre it was, in Moroccan terms, extremely expensive. The restaurateur smiled and said he would send me a real plumber, who was a good Muslim. I guessed that meant he would be respectful and wouldn’t try to cheat me.

  Unable to do anything further, I strolled to the souk and bought some luscious peaches for Khadija and her family, which cost about half Abdul’s daily wage. It was Friday and I’d been invited for lunch.

  While we ate – chicken with noodles, a tomato and onion salad, fresh fruit to follow – I asked how she and Abdul had met. He’d first glimpsed her when she drove in to park at his parking station, he told me, his unshaven face lighting up as he spoke. Somehow he’d mustered the courage to approach her, though I gathered Khadija hadn’t been too impressed with him at first. Perhaps she harboured higher aspirations – I didn’t ask. But he won her over and went to her family to ask for her hand in marriage.

  When I enquired how she’d felt about this she glanced down coyly. Her dowry of two th
ousand dirhams had been arranged, and they had an elaborate wedding that went on for three days and nights. Before it began, Khadija’s friends had prepared her carefully, painting designs on her hands and feet with henna and dressing her in an elaborate costume, which was changed several times over the course of the ceremony. The bride and groom initially celebrated separately, then Abdul rode to Khadija’s place on a white horse, accompanied by friends who sang and banged drums all the way. After more partying, bride and groom were seated on circular platforms covered with gold fabric, which were suspended aloft and carried into their bedchamber.

  They produced a series of photo albums. Khadija was only seventeen at the time and the prospect of marriage must have been confronting, for in the pictures she looked grim, unsmiling and scared. Perhaps she was contemplating the moment when the wedding sheet with the spot of blood would be carried outside to the waiting crowd, a practice still current among all but Westernised Moroccans. If the bride does not bleed it shows she wasn’t a virgin, and huge shame is brought upon her family. Her new husband may even disown her.

  There were also photos of young Ayoub on his ‘cutting day’. Circumcision is obligatory for Muslim males, and a major event in the lives of young Moroccan boys. It is done between the ages of three and seven, when the boy is old enough to remember the occasion but too young to make trouble. There are variations on this amazing ritual all over Morocco, but common elements are shared by traditional communities.

  Before the chosen day, which is usually during spring, the house will be thoroughly cleaned and a room whitewashed for the boy’s use. Special bread is baked and a ram purchased for slaughter. The slaughtering is done the day before, and blood is put above the front door to ask the blessing of the djinns, or spirits. That evening, the boy’s mother places a wooden plate of sheep or goat excrement on the terrace under the stars, to endow it with magical properties.