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

by Suzanna Clarke

  ‘Seven thousand,’ said the carpenter.

  ‘Two thousand, six hundred.’

  ‘Let us be serious,’ he said. ‘Six thousand.’

  This went on until the carpenter, seeing I wasn’t going to shift much further, accepted three and a half thousand dirhams and the doors were ours. Although pleased with the deal, I had mixed feelings, wondering if by buying the doors I was fuelling a market in cultural heritage that I did not agree with. I consoled myself with the thought that at least these two remarkable doors would remain in Fez.

  ‘But what on earth are we going to do with them?’ Sandy said as we left the shop after paying for them and arranging delivery.

  I had no idea. We now had a useless set of beautiful doors but still no wardrobe for our clothes, which along with everything else in the house were coated in a fine film of lime and sand. When I woke coughing in the middle of the night I thought about the damage microscopic particles can do to the delicate tissue of the lungs. We had brought expensive dust masks back from Australia for the workers but they refused to wear them, saying they’d be too hot. We cajoled and threatened, painting a picture of what would happen to their health in the future if they didn’t use them. But we couldn’t get them to take us seriously.

  One day, I was horrified to see the men breaking up an asbestos drainpipe in the courtyard with a hammer – dust and fragments were flying everywhere. They were disbelieving when I told them what harm this could do. More as a reaction to my semi-hysteria than from any understanding of the implications, they stopped smashing up the pipe. But they still would not don masks for the dusty jobs.

  I quizzed Si Mohamed about this. ‘Why won’t the men wear masks?’

  He shrugged. ‘They are Moroccan men.’

  What was he saying? That Westerners were pampered pansies for trying to avoid mesothelioma? There wasn’t a culture of workplace health and safety in Morocco. Despite numerous regulations, there were insufficient resources to implement them. More than seventy per cent of workers did not have medical insurance. We chose to pay if our workers needed to visit a doctor or dentist, knowing they could not afford to.

  On the other hand, Mustapha told me about one of his builder friends who, aged 105, had married a woman of 101 the previous week. It was good to hear that there were some long-lived builders around, although that probably gave the rest of them a false sense of security.

  Being concerned for our own health as well, we had intended to move out of the house for the most intense part of the restoration, but the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music was about to begin and all the accommodation was full. The only inhabitant of the house who didn’t seem fazed by the environmental hazards was the kitten we’d acquired.

  I had resolved not to rescue any of the pitiful, mewing little balls of fluff I’d seen on the streets, steeling myself to walk past them even though the riad was cat paradise – a courtyard with trees, a house with lots of nooks and crannies, and a regular food supply. But we had to go back to Australia, and I wasn’t about to adopt something I couldn’t promise a future to.

  Then one evening we were invited to a barbeque at the home of Peter and Karen, an Australian couple in the Medina. They had a house up the hill from us, a tall and narrow dar with formal rooms downstairs and the main living area on the first floor, surrounding the four sides of an atrium. It was when we ascended to the roof that we discovered their reason for buying the house – the view was stunning. It was like being perched in the centre of an amphitheatre, with the panorama encompassing the west of the city. Alpine swifts dived and circled in the darkening light. Over the terrace wall, we could see the goings on in the local square.

  There was a sense of the surreal having a barbeque in such a location. While we were eating, a tortoiseshell kitten came out of her hidey hole on the terrace and started to play with the straps of Sandy’s bag. She had bald patches on her head, making her look as if she’d had brain surgery.

  A few weeks before, Karen had seen her sitting on the street looking pathetic and miserable. She was covered in globs of glue, and although Karen too had resolved not to rescue kittens, she was unable to resist taking the little thing home to clean her up. The only way she could get rid of the glue was to pull it off, hence the bald patches. The kitten had flourished with Karen and Peter’s care and was playful and trusting, but they were returning to Australia the following week and dreaded having to put her back on the street.

  Being suckers for small creatures, Sandy and I offered to look after her for the five months until their next stay. When she climbed up my leg and settled on my lap, falling fast asleep, I decided she’d be the perfect Fez pet – a returnable one.

  OUR CHAOTIC NEW life began to develop a pattern. Most mornings found Si Mohamed and me running back and forth between home and Bab Guissa, shopping for supplies for Mustapha, while Sandy stayed home to supervise. One day, Mustapha gave me an order for five hundred bricks, but I discovered to my amazement that there were no first-quality, handmade bricks to be found in Fez. A woman in Marrakesh had bought them all, and as only one factory made such bricks, it would take a few days to restock.

  On our way back to the riad, we passed a house that had just collapsed. Emergency workers were clearing the rubble while a curious crowd packed the street, hampering their efforts. Si Mohamed asked a bystander what had happened, and we learnt that a pregnant woman had been killed when the roof collapsed. Such occurrences were unfortunately regular in Fez, although after the collapse which killed the eleven mosque worshippers, the authorities had erected scaffolding to prop up more than a thousand endangered buildings.

  I returned home with a renewed respect for the dangers of cracked walls and rotten beams, and found two potential new employees waiting for an interview. Fatima and Halima were, as David put it when he recommended them, ‘lady strippers’. They stripped paint off timber and ironwork with Decapant, a chemical paint remover. Both in their forties, they were dressed, like most women of their generation, in traditional style, but had been forced into a non-traditional role because their husbands were sick and they had children to support.

  Fatima, the more assertive of the two, had a narrow face and a beaky nose. Halima’s face was softer and round, with two teeth crossed over at the front that gave her a slightly goofy look. But appearances were hardly relevant. They were keen, and the idea of employing women appealed to us. It was rare to find women working in the building trade in Morocco – it was unusual anywhere, for that matter.

  I told them we’d give them a week’s trial, and after that we’d see. As few Moroccan workers bring so much as a screwdriver to work, it was no surprise to find these confident women giving Si Mohamed a list of things they needed. I followed him to our local hole-in-the-wall hardware store at R’Cif to pay for it all. It was just as well I did, for when the list was being assembled I noticed two huge wire brushes on the counter. I stared at them in alarm. Were these what the women intended to use on our delicately carved wood? It would be shredded in seconds. When I questioned Si Mohamed he argued with me.

  ‘These are what everyone uses for Decapant.’

  Not convinced, I asked him to wait while I called David, who couldn’t have been more emphatic.

  ‘Do not let a wire brush into your house,’ he said. ‘Absolutely not. Get soft steel wool instead. Just ask for halfa.’

  Armed with my newest Darija word, I completed our purchases, but when Fatima and Halima started the next day, they were disgusted I wouldn’t let them use wire brushes. It was the beginning of a tussle that even saw them smuggling in the banned implements. But it was a tussle I won.

  I was tired of having to trail through the Medina twenty paces behind Si Mohamed so he wouldn’t get arrested again, but there was no official permit that would allow him to be seen publicly with us. So we devised a strategy for creating one.

  I wrote a letter stating that Si Mohamed worked for Sandy and me and needed to be on the street in our company when we went to
buy materials. He translated it into Arabic, and to the relief of us both it was duly stamped and authorised at the government office.

  ‘Do we need to do more than this?’ I asked the man behind the counter, and was told no, that would be fine.

  Walking out of the office, Si Mohamed and I headed for Bab Fettouh to buy sponge to make mattresses for banquettes. As we got out of the taxi, two plainclothes police accosted us, demanding to know what Si Mohamed was doing with a foreigner. He pulled out the freshly stamped authorisation and they scrutinised it, trying to find something wrong. Reluctantly they handed it back and told us we needed to go to the main police station to register it.

  Deciding we should play by the rules, no matter how absurd, we caught another taxi to the police station in the Ville Nouvelle. We were shunted from office to office before we found a man who said that if I were working for Si Mohamed he could help us, but as it was the other way around we needed to go to the Tourist Police.

  We went back to the centre of town in yet another taxi and into another police station. We knocked on several doors but it seemed no one was in. We went for morning coffee, and on our return found the office of the Chief of Tourist Police, explained what we wanted to his secretary, then waited outside while a family went in. Finally the secretary poked his head out and made a gesture to come in, but when I moved forward he put up a hand to stop me. Si Mohamed went in alone.

  Moments later he was back out, shaking with impotent rage. ‘It is useless,’ he said.

  As we rode despondently home he told me the story. The Chief of Tourist Police turned out to be the man who’d put him in jail the previous year and he remembered him. Si Mohamed explained his new situation but the chief shouted him down, insisting that if he was seen in the Medina with a foreigner he’d be arrested.

  When Si Mohamed asked the chief what I should do when I needed translation help he was told I should hire a licensed guide.

  ‘But Suzanna knows her way around the Medina as well as I do,’ Si Mohamed said.

  ‘She still needs a guide.’

  I’d never heard anything so ridiculous. I was supposed to ring a guide every time I wanted to pop out for a few building materials? I didn’t need someone to show me where to go, just someone who understood Moroccan building terms and what it was our workers needed. Besides, what guide was going to be on call for half an hour’s work at a time, several times a day, at reasonable rates?

  I asked around to see what other foreigners did and was told that all the workers were supposed to stay inside the house. If they were seen on the street with you they’d be arrested. I knew the crackdown on guides had been good for tourism, but this seemed a tad overzealous. What if Ayisha were seen on the street with me? I wondered.

  As it happened, I’d been out with Ayisha a day or so before. We stopped at her house to drop off her shopping, since it was close to our riad. I suppressed a gasp of surprise when I entered her house – I had not been in a smaller, poorer house in the Medina. The downstairs courtyard was minute, lined with uneven concrete, and Ayisha’s family rented a room upstairs, a space of about twenty square metres. This was the entire space for a family of seven. At one end was a niche with an impossibly tiny kitchen.

  ‘Where do you all sleep?’ I asked.

  Ayisha waved at the banquettes around the room. ‘Five of us sleep here, and the other two up there.’ She indicated a small, curtained mezzanine. The space was hardly big enough for seven people to stretch out full-length, let alone have a modicum of privacy. Such poverty did not equate with the beautiful, well-dressed Ayisha I knew, yet it was the only house she had ever lived in. When she’d told me she came from a poor family I had not realised how poor.

  On the way out, I was confronted with two entrances. I went to take the one that led to the street, but Ayisha stopped me.

  ‘No, not that way,’ she said. ‘That way is only for dead people.’

  ‘What?’ It was an ordinary-looking door leading straight onto the street from the courtyard, whereas the main front door, four metres along, was screened by wooden panels so that passers-by could not see inside.

  ‘They only use that door when someone dies and they need to get the body out.’ Ayisha made her body taut, holding her hands up to her chest. ‘This is the way they take you out, because of our religion.’

  She told me that when someone died their body was put on view for the family, after first being ritually prepared by those of the same gender. It was washed with perfumed oils, the feet were bound, and the right hand was placed over the left on the chest.

  ‘They wrap the body in a piece of white cloth and they put it in the middle of the courtyard and read the Koran on his soul,’ explained Ayisha. ‘Then they put it on a plank of wood and take it out the door to the cemetery. Women are not allowed to go with it, they can only visit the grave on the second day.’

  I was grateful for the way Ayisha would volunteer these insights into Moroccan customs. Shortly afterwards I was the one giving her the insights – on the mysteries of academic writing when she asked me to correct an English assignment for her. She had almost completed her arts degree and was understandably nervous about her job prospects once she graduated. Morocco has tens of thousands of unemployed graduates competing for an extremely limited pool of positions, but that didn’t deter students from working hard to obtain a degree – on the contrary.

  On our way home through the Medina one night, Sandy and I were bemused to see groups of young men gathered under streetlights, reading. What were they doing? The mystery was solved by David the next day. It was close to exam time and people studied on the street because they had no private space to do so at home. Nor could they turn on a light when everyone else was sleeping. I wished that a number of Australian students I knew could see them.

  I suggested Ayisha write a CV, backing it up with some references, which I could give to the owners of guesthouses I knew. I thought she’d make an ideal front-of-house-person. When I told her she was welcome to come to a tutorial Jon was giving me on Excel spreadsheet, so she could include it on her CV, she inexplicably burst into tears, putting her head on my shoulder and sobbing.

  I comforted her for a moment and then went on in a matter-of-fact way. With my Anglo-Celtic reserve, I didn’t know quite what to do with the weepy young Ayisha, who, like many Moroccan women I’d met, was far more used to openly expressing her emotions than I was.

  At the end of their first week of work, I sat down at a table to pay the workers in the customary way. Si Mohamed called them individually and explained the amounts to them.

  ‘Six days at a hundred and fifty dirhams a day is nine hundred dirhams.’

  I handed them the money and waited while they counted it, then thanked them for their work.

  ‘You look the picture of a colonial administrator,’ Sandy laughed, and for a brief uncomfortable moment, I had a vision of myself as the patron of a rubber plantation, doling out a pittance to exploited workers. Yet the reality was that we were giving six people full-time work for several months on above-average wages. Local unemployment was so high you could virtually walk out into the street and say you wanted unskilled labourers and you’d have an instant queue. It was finding people with traditional building skills that was difficult.

  We liked our workers. All were over the age of forty, except Si Mohamed, and they had a steady, reliable air. The men were usually silent while they worked, the only sound a rhythmic chink, chink as they removed plaster. Fatima and Halima, whom we’d dubbed the decapo ladies, maintained a constant chatter, and as I couldn’t understand what they were saying, it was a pleasant background noise that could almost lull me to sleep. There was a wonderful sense of purposefulness in the house, of a shared goal.

  ‘Your house is my house,’ Mustapha declared one day. ‘I am working from the heart.’

  The riad had not had any proper maintenance done for decades. Now was its time.

  The following week, the plumber came to repair
the fountain. We watched with concern as he began to dig a channel through our beautifully tiled courtyard to find the pipe.

  I had ignored David’s disparaging comments about the Victorian style of the fountain. ‘It’s not at all traditional,’ he protested. ‘Fassi fountains were very low.’

  Sandy was all set to take it out, but I wanted to wait until we had something better to replace it with. Antique marble fountains being rare and expensive, I knew we were in for a long wait.

  But even the prospect of sitting in the courtyard with the sparrows chirping to the sound of tinkling water did little to assuage our dismay at the destruction of sections of the courtyard. Thankfully the plumber came across the pipe after digging only a couple of small holes. It was completely rusted up. He removed and replaced it.

  He made a couple more visits, installed a small pump, and when he switched it on everyone stood around to watch, clapping and cheering as the water shot skywards. Sandy adjusted the pressure to a gentle spray, which fell into the bowl and splashed over the edge into the pool below. It was so pretty that we spent hours at night watching the play of water – much more restful than television.

  Meanwhile more discoveries were being made. Beneath the dull grey paint on the massreiya doors, the decapo ladies uncovered an exquisite geometric design painted in yellows and browns. We estimated it dated from the mid-nineteenth century, about the same time the Iraqi glass windows in that room were created. The women had already damaged one section by leaving paint stripper on it overnight, so we halted work on it until we got some advice.

  David came to the rescue yet again and recommended a restorer. Using cotton buds, the man painstakingly removed layer after layer of paint. It took three days before the design was revealed, and fortunately it was largely intact. It amazed me that someone had painted over it in the first place.

  The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music, held during June, was a reminder of what the world outside had to offer. It had begun in response to the first Gulf War of 1991, as a way of bringing different religions together to share and appreciate one another’s traditions. This year’s nine-day festival had a smorgasbord of spiritual and religious music from Syria, Iran, India, Mali, Latin America, Japan, Tibet, Azerbaijan and the Mediterranean, along with a talkfest on such topics as wealth and poverty, spirituality and ecology; a literary café; and documentaries that were to be presented by the filmmakers.