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

by Suzanna Clarke

  The professor was also a wonderful cook and regularly invited us to share the electricians’ lunch, which included things like kefta – small spiced meatballs – and eggs. As our contribution we would send the sweeper out to the souk with a pot, which would be brought back filled with besara, a simple but delicious split-pea soup. With the addition of black olives and bread, and accompanied by, strangely, Coca-Cola, this made for a more interesting lunch than the sandwiches Sandy and I normally had. We would all sit together in a circle, dipping our bread into the various dishes and making appreciative noises.

  David, on one of his inspections, reckoned we had done things in reverse order, and would need to do some rewiring after our structural work. But it was too late to change now. He had never got around to rewiring his own house, and I could see why. He probably couldn’t stand the trauma of seeing his beautiful, carefully restored walls burrowed into in such a cavalier fashion.

  Fully occupied with running the American Language Center during the week, David usually made his tour of inspection on Saturday mornings. He would come for a cup of coffee and check on the progress. Sandy and I looked forward to these visits and dreaded them at the same time. He invariably found something wrong that we hadn’t noticed, and which was time-consuming, expensive and tricky to fix. But we had to admit he was always right.

  Mustapha merely dreaded these visits. ‘Monsieur David?’ he said, rolling his eyes and flicking his fingers. ‘Oh, là là!’

  One Saturday, David took a look in the kitchen, where a hole had been cut in a supporting wall to allow a window onto the courtyard. ‘What are you doing? You haven’t got a structural support for the roof!’ He said this in a tone that made it sound as if we were allowing a three-year-old to play on a busy road. Mustapha’s face fell and he scurried off to get scaffolding to fix it.

  Meanwhile other things were on the move. After four false and frustrating attempts, we finally engaged a new carpenter. Finding a carpenter in Fez has a lot in common with dating. There’s the giddy excitement of thinking you’ve found someone special, followed by days of chasing them on the phone or waiting for them to ring you. Then he turns out to have so many other offers he can’t possibly see you again, or his work is less attractive than you initially thought, or so expensive you can’t afford him anyway.

  But at last we hired a bright, enthusiastic and funny young man named Noureddine, whose first contribution was to announce that we needed to replace the entire kitchen ceiling. This was made of four huge supporting beams, dozens of gayzers, and a layer of planks, revealed when we removed the false ceiling.

  We liked the way the ancient cedar beams were blackened with years of smoke from cooking fires, and wanted to keep them as they were. We hadn’t allowed for their replacement in our budget at all, but Noureddine thought the ends of the beams looked dodgy, and many were broken. As replacing them meant removing the intricate zellij on the floor above, then digging out more than a foot of earth used as insulating material, it was a less than thrilling prospect. But David was also of the opinion it needed to be done.

  ‘The zellij is only recent,’ he scoffed, ‘1920s or so.’

  So suddenly we were committed to removing and replacing an entire ceiling and floor. As the room above the kitchen led to the one we were now using as our bedroom, I wondered how exactly we would get there.

  It also meant another trip to the Hole of Moulay Idriss for more gayzas. I was disappointed in the quality on offer this time – they were either bowed or full of rot. Then I spotted some massive beams, the longest almost five metres, as solid as any I’d seen, and so thick I imagined they must have been cut from trees hundreds of years old.

  I tried to hide the glow in my eyes, but purchasing them for a good price turned out to be remarkably easy. Getting them home was less so. After being trucked to R’Cif, they were carried to our place, where the porters insisted on much more money than we’d agreed on because they hadn’t realised the beams were so heavy. An argument broke out between the porters and Si Mohamed, with a lot of angry gesticulating, shouting, and puffing out and pushing in of chests. The decapo ladies and Mustapha stood muttering darkly that the ringleader was crazy because he smoked too much hashish.

  We ended up meeting the porters’ demands halfway, and then had to find a way to get the huge beams inside. I figured they were far too long to fit around the turn in the stairs, and then suddenly it dawned on me what one of the old walled-up windows we’d discovered in the kitchen was for. It was in line with the front door, and I’d assumed it had been used for urns of oil and other supplies, but now I saw that it was the perfect size and position for getting long beams in. Within an hour the window was reopened, and with many grunts and the occasional curse, they were pushed through into the house.

  Mustapha was ecstatic about the beams. ‘These are like gold,’ he said. He stroked them, examined them, and even identified which parts of the roof they had come from, according to the nail holes.

  There was significant progress elsewhere in the house a couple of days later, with Noureddine completing the restoration of the ceiling in the front entrance, whose planks had been partially eaten away with woodworm. He had installed gayzers before replacing the planks, and when the decapo women saw the results of their paint-stripping work in place, there were tears in their eyes. Three coats of paint – white, green and brown – had been stripped off to reveal dark-grained cedar that seemed to glow from within. This small section of ceiling looked suddenly elegant and refined, but made the rest of the house look even shoddier.

  Working down my to-do list I went hunting for kitchen items, and had a sobering reminder of the reality of most Moroccans’ lives. Si Mohamed and I went up and down Rue Cuny in the Ville Nouvelle trying to find a kitchen sink that was more than six inches deep. When I did find one of European depth, they wanted the equivalent of six hundred dollars for it.

  I made the mistake of voicing my thoughts aloud to Si Mohamed. ‘In Australia I could buy that much more cheaply. And I’d have a choice of all sorts of designs.’

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realised what I must have sounded like. I loathe it when people play the comparison game, dissatisfied with where they are at present. Yet here I was doing exactly that.

  Si Mohamed bluntly put me in my place. ‘But we are not in Australia. People here have simple kitchens.’

  I castigated myself. I remembered having dinner in a fancy restaurant on our first trip to Fez. Going out to the toilet past the kitchen, I glimpsed two women huddled over a single gas-burner on the ground, from which they had produced six amazing courses.

  I eventually found a simple ceramic sink that was marginally deeper, and bought it. Next, I needed stone to make bench tops. Moroccan stone comes in beautiful subtle colours – patterned beiges, mottled yellows, creams, pinks, black and green. I really liked a cream-coloured one that looked as though it had translucent grains of fossilised wheat in it. The drawback was that the stone wasn’t very hard and scratched easily. The other choice was Italian marble, but I’d seen so many laminex bench tops trying to emulate it that when I saw the real thing it looked somehow fake. I took away a couple of samples of local stone and caught a taxi back to the Medina, dropping Si Mohamed off on the way.

  Getting out at R’Cif, I found a large crowd blocking the footpath on either side of the road. Curiously there was no talking or pushing or shouting; everyone was standing still and silent, as though waiting for something. The only sound was a whistle, like that at a basketball game. Peering between people, I saw what had their attention. Lying motionless on the ground was a boy of about five or six, his legs covered in blood. His eyes were wide with shock but he did not whimper or cry out. As I watched he moved his legs.

  The astonishing thing was that no one was with the boy, holding his hand or his head, comforting him. He lay apart in his own island of pain. Cars continued to drive around him. There were no hysterical relatives, no one rushing forward to administ
er first aid. The crowd was simply waiting and watching. I thought about pushing through and going to him, but I felt the force of the crowd like a barrier. I found excuses not to intervene. This was not my drama. What could I do? I couldn’t speak his language. I had no medical skills. There was a policeman there, and presumably an ambulance was on its way.

  Walking home, I felt ashamed of what I felt to be my complicity in the crowd’s passivity. Maybe, I thought, this was due to the belief that events unfolded as Allah willed – you could not do anything to avoid your fate. I was constantly amazed that there weren’t more accidents in Fez, given the way people wandered all over the road amid traffic. Today was the first evidence I’d seen that they didn’t always do so with impunity.

  A few weeks later, I was walking down an alley and was thrilled to spot the same young boy, his leg in a grubby plaster cast, sitting in a doorway. He looked bored and frustrated, but at least he was alive.

  Although the electrical work was now finished, the electricity account still hadn’t been changed into our names. I went with Si Mohamed back to the utilities office at R’Cif, where for some reason the clerk wanted to see my roqsa. We trudged home to fetch it and returned.

  ‘No, not this permit,’ he said. ‘The other one.’

  ‘Which one? I don’t have another.’

  ‘You must have,’ he insisted. ‘I want to see the one for operating commercial premises.’

  ‘But I’m not operating anything commercial.’

  ‘Then why do you want four lines into your premises instead of the usual two?’

  I had no idea why he was asking this when I only wanted to change the name of the account. ‘Because that’s what the electrician said we needed for the lights, washing machine, fridge, oven and heaters. Two lines won’t do if we need to run everything at once.’

  The man stared at me as though it had never occurred to him that anyone would contemplate such a thing. He said, ‘Then you need a permit saying you are not going to operate commercial premises.’

  Somewhere else I would have thought he was making a Kaf kaesque jest. But he was serious, and so we headed to the baladiya. Thankfully the nice chap was there.

  ‘No,’ he told me, ‘you don’t need another permit.’

  ‘Well, why won’t they just put my power on how I want it?’

  ‘The trouble is you’ve requested four lines. For such a request you need to fill out the appropriate form, pay four thousand dirhams and supply the architect’s plans. Then a committee will come and inspect your property to see if it’s suitable for commercial purposes.’

  ‘But I don’t want to run a commercial operation. It’s a private residence – it’s simply a big house and I have several appliances and lots of lights.’

  ‘Then you’ll need to get the committee to confirm this.’

  My brain was dizzy from going round in circles, but suddenly I saw a way out. ‘What if I only ask for two lines?’

  The nice chap smiled. ‘Then you don’t need any forms.’

  It was a win, but at a cost. I had planned on giving the gas stove I’d bought the year before to Si Mohamed’s mother, who didn’t have one, and installing an electric oven and a gas stovetop. But now I wouldn’t be able to run an electric oven, and probably not a washing machine either. When it grew colder a few months later, we blew the entire electrical system by turning on a single radiator.

  In the Medina, people are used to living with just a couple of lights and a single gas burner, so what else would you need modern Western lighting and appliances for, if not to run a guesthouse or a factory? What I wanted to know was, if I was paying for it what difference did it make to the electricity company?

  I never discovered the answer to that.

  IT WAS NOW the end of July and the heat beat down into the courtyard in the middle of the day, making the dust stick to sweaty bodies and the work seem much harder. Outside the thick walls of the Medina, it was even hotter. The seasons in Morocco can be extreme. August regularly has days exceeding forty degrees, yet during the past two winters it had been cold enough to snow in Fez itself, something which hadn’t been heard of in more than a decade.

  One Saturday morning, while David was making his tour of inspection, Mustapha’s recurring nightmare worsened. This time David was joined by Rachid and Zina. Things were fine until they saw the wall in the downstairs salon that had been partially removed to reveal the ancient mezzanine.

  ‘But what weight was it carrying?’ David asked, leading the delegation upstairs to inspect.

  ‘Monsieur David is always looking for a disaster,’ muttered Mustapha, following after him. He might have thought David was overreacting, but a nasty crack in the wall above had grown worse in the past few days and now stretched to the corner of the room.

  Rachid and Zina were alarmed, and insisted we shift our bed from its position right next to the wall, where there appeared to be nothing much to prevent the entire floor from caving in and taking us with it. With a thick layer of dirt between the floor and the ceiling below, the weight was substantial and a collapse at one end could lead to a domino effect along the whole length.

  Back in the downstairs salon, Mustapha, on instructions from Rachid, removed a gayza to reveal a badly rotting supporting beam, and there were calls for immediate scaffolding. A debate was then carried out in Darija, French and English about the whys and wherefores of using metal beams in place of wooden ones to take the weight. Being a purist, David was vehemently against metal.

  As I’d managed to buy some magnificent wooden beams just days before, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. We would use one of them. Plaster was put on a small section of the crack in the upstairs salon, so we could see whether it was still growing.

  Checking the strength of the outside wall along the top alley, Rachid discovered a massive old lintel hidden in a cavity over the stairs to the terrace. The door it had once protected was now walled up and invisible under plaster, but he said it was likely to have been the main entrance off the street for that wing of the house.

  We paid another visit to the woman in the adjoining house, who was shortly moving out. Rachid gave cries of delight on seeing the ancient wooden masharabbia screens that formed the balustrade. It was in such original condition, nothing messed with, that he found it jaw-dropping.

  ‘I am just pleased I saw this before I died,’ said Rachid quietly, snapping a few photos.

  All the experts were of the opinion, as we’d thought, that the neighbour’s house had once been joined with ours. The area where our riad now stood was likely to have been their garden. The bricked-in window we’d found in our kitchen suggested there’d once been a view onto the garden from their place.

  There were additional clues. Halfway up our downstairs salon wall was another lintel, suggesting a door through from the neighbour’s salon. The most likely explanation for the building of our riad was that the generation who owned the neighbour’s house had died and the inheritance was split between several grown children, who needed to expand to accommodate their families.

  The two sections of our riad had evidently started off as separate wings with their own entrances, as Rachid’s discovery of the lintel of the old door onto the top alley showed. When we started to fix the floor of the upstairs salon, we discovered the remains of a line of green tiles with an exterior finish: this salon, a later addition to the riad, had once been the neighbour’s roof terrace, at a time when the whole structure was only one storey high. The massreiya would also have been added later.

  In contrast to their excitement over the prospective failure of the supporting beam in the salon, Rachid, David and Zina were non chalant about the chicken coop that intersected the massreiya wall, saying the deep cracks were normal and not that difficult to fix, which was a relief.

  The workers were removing the last of the insulating layer of earth between the kitchen ceiling and the massreiya floor when they found the skull of a cat. I was intrigued. I knew that it had
been the practice in many parts of the world to make a sacrifice to the gods of the earth when their domain was intruded upon by construction work: a peace offering was required. Sacrifices were also made to give strength and stability to a building, with animals replacing the original human sacrifices. In parts of Greece, they still kill a rooster or a sheep and let the blood flow onto new foundations.

  There is evidence that animals and ritual objects were also used to protect homes in Western cultures. In the 1970s, a curator at the Northampton Museum in the UK realised that the steady stream of people bringing in single old shoes they’d found concealed in their houses was more than coincidental. Many such items have also been discovered during restorations to nineteenth-century buildings in London, and in the Rocks area of Sydney. They were generally found in places where it was thought witches or evil spirits could enter, such as doors or chimneys. Mummified cats, too, have been found in both countries, secreted near front doors.

  Ian Evans, an Australian expert on the subject, believes the practice has a long history, a couple of thousand years or more, and that it made its way to Australia with the convicts. It ran parallel to Christianity, with people indulging in folk magic while going to church on Sundays. Since shoes were the only item of clothing to retain the shape of the body when not worn, they were placed in buildings in an attempt to deceive witches and spirits as they roamed the countryside at night, and to distract them from family members.

  But no one I asked could tell me if the cat skull in our floor had been put there deliberately. Nor was it our only unnerving discovery. While rebuilding a section of the kitchen, Mustapha unearthed a live snake in the wall. It was a small, blind, metallic-grey thing, and probably lived on woodworm.

  Even more unexpected than its discovery was the reaction of the workers, who behaved as if it were a deadly taipan. In reality it was about the size of a chisel, and not acting aggressively. Mustapha wanted to kill it, but Sandy and I intervened. A few days earlier, the workers had caught a lizard and crushed it immediately, claiming it was poisonous. Unconvinced, Sandy looked it up on the Internet and found it was not only harmless, but also rare and endangered. Now he put the snake in a plastic bag and let it go in a dry open drain, where small boys poked it with sticks until it managed to slither away.