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

by Suzanna Clarke

  When the team spirit was needed, though, it was there in spades. After a day with eighteen workers on site, we had a dinner party for five friends to prepare. The entire work crew remained after knock-off time and transformed the place in ten minutes flat, sweeping up bucketloads of dirt, washing the floor of the downstairs salon, shifting the big dining table and chairs into it, even though the plaster on the walls was still wet. Sandy and I did the cooking in a corner of the courtyard, wearing mountaineer’s headlamps to see what we were doing.

  David, who had just returned from several weeks in the States, walked around the house open-mouthed, ogling the changes. ‘You guys have managed to do more in three months than I have in five years,’ he marvelled. We pointed out that he had a full-time job, while we were dedicated solely to the project and had a minimum of twelve people a day working on it.

  But it was true that in the previous month the pace of work had picked up. Now the halka was finished, the catwalk was under way, the kitchen had been plastered, along with the downstairs salon – which also had stained glass in the windows – the trenches in the courtyard had been filled, and the bathroom was close to complete. I had designed some furniture and had it made – a dining table and chairs, and a wrought-iron sofa with vibrant red cushions. Things were on the up. With the salon doors shut, we could almost pretend the place was finished.

  This was pure illusion, of course, since opening the door revealed a courtyard that looked like a missile had landed there. But we were feeling optimistic that we might even get the bulk of the work done before we had to return to Australia.

  My trip to Granada had renewed my interest in the work of the refugees from Al Andalus, so one morning I set off for the Andalusian quarter, with no particular plan in mind other than to follow the main street and see where it led.

  The character of this quarter is subtly different, its buildings more compact and not as tall as those in other parts of Fez. Close to the top of the hill on Derb Yasmina, a heavy gateway frames a masharabbia screen door. This is the entry to the Medersa Sahrij, one of three religious colleges surrounding the thirteenth-century Jamaa Andalous Mosque, where theology students live and study in tiny rooms. Inside the gate is a most exquisite place.

  I found myself standing in a long rectangular courtyard bound by beautifully decorated walls. In the middle was a large pool of a clear aqua colour, also rectangular, fed by a low circular fountain at one end. I was immediately transported back to the Alhambra, except that instead of being among hordes of tourists, I was alone. The work in both places was similar, and as they had been constructed during the fourteenth century, perhaps some artisans had worked on both. Every square centimetre of the Medersa Sahrij’s walls had the same elaborate carved plaster as the Alhambra, and the balustrades were made of detailed masharabbia. The columns along the two longest sides of the courtyard were covered with zellij.

  What a place to wake up in, I thought, savouring the harmonious atmosphere created by the perfect symmetry and exceptional workmanship.

  Back out on the street, I noticed an unassuming, two-storey building with a small entrance opposite Jamaa Andalous Mosque.

  ‘It’s the only working caravanserai left in Fez,’ said a middle-aged, djellaba-clad man nearby who saw me looking. ‘People who come in from the country can stay for five dirhams a night, and keep their horses downstairs.’

  Five dirhams a night? Not a bad deal.

  The shops in this section of Fez were only single-storey, and in among them I found another intriguing doorway. A workman was just leaving, and peering over his shoulder I saw that inside was a zaouia, a place of worship for Sufis, with tombs of Sufi saints covered in zellij. I had a soft spot for Sufis, not just from the ceremonies I’d been to, but because the brotherhoods supported the mentally ill and the disabled, among others.

  Sandy departed again, this time for two weeks in Australia to launch his latest book. The plumber, being a fundamentalist, was disconcerted to learn that Sandy wasn’t around, and yet he had a habit of arriving at odd times, often when everyone else had gone. Once, I came downstairs and interrupted him changing into his work clothes, and before you could say humdillilah, he had changed back again and was out the door to the mosque.

  But he’d done enough work by now that I was close to being able to have a real shower. I could almost taste it. I planned to stand under that hot water for a long time, after which I might saunter into the kitchen and turn on my chrome tap, admiring the way the hot water mixed so delightfully with the cold. The way it swirled as it went down the plughole, and then actually went somewhere, instead of creating a muddy puddle.

  Eventually, though, my impatience got the better of me, and after yet another unsatisfactory reminder phone call to the plumber, I took matters into my own hands. With Si Mohamed and a little help from Noureddine, I got the shower working in half an hour.

  Getting the hot water going was a bit more tricky, as the gas cylinder had to be installed upstairs, above the shower, in the section of the house where the catwalk was being rebuilt. Noureddine managed to winch the cylinder up, balancing precariously on the scaffolding. We fiddled around with the gas but were missing a vital connecting hose. It was getting late and we were all tired, so decided to leave it until the next day.

  Perhaps sensing he was being usurped, the plumber turned up the following morning and completed what we had started, stopping every so often to complain about our sloppy workmanship.

  After all the workers had gone, I undressed for my inaugural shower. The weather had turned chilly and I shivered in the evening air. No matter, the months of waiting were over. I would soon be standing under copious hot water delivered straight from my own shower. I turned on the tap and waited. And waited. And waited. What could possibly be wrong now? Was it the plumber’s revenge for all my evil thoughts about him?

  There was nothing for it but to get dressed again and find my way upstairs in the dark, through the precarious reconstruction of the catwalk to the gas bottle. There I discovered that some fuckwit – no, I’ll rephrase that – some caring, dedicated member of my staff had switched the cylinder off in consideration of my safety.

  Back in the shower, I was relived to hear a whoosh as the gas flame caught alight overhead, followed by hot water bursting out of the shower head and over my grateful body. I stood letting the warmth soak into the very core of my being, washing away not only grit but the nagging tension I’d been holding in the pit of my stomach.

  The kitchen fittings were going in at last. Noureddine’s moment of truth arrived. He cast a grin back over his shoulder at me as seven men in the courtyard hoisted aloft the massive kitchen cupboard he had painstakingly created.

  ‘Bismillah,’ Mustapha said, and they all echoed the word of thanks to Allah.

  As they carried it through to the kitchen, they started to sing a song of dedication in deep, rich voices. Meanwhile Fatima and Halima gave ululating cries. I felt a surge of love for these people who had become such an integral part of my life.

  I raced upstairs to keep an eye on proceedings through the halka. When they lifted the cupboard over the benchtop, avoiding the tap with difficulty, they found it wouldn’t fit against the wall – Noureddine had forgotten to remove several bits of overhanging wood at one end. While the men pushed the other end through the window and held it in place, Noureddine sawed pieces off. Mustapha muttered, ‘Noureddine would forget to eat his own breakfast.’

  The cabinet was still about a centimetre too big, so someone fetched a chisel and started hacking into the layer of haarsh on the wall. Wads of dirt flew about the place, and I tried to ignore the heavy boots clomping on my new benchtop. Finally the cupboard was pushed approximately into place, but then there was another problem. Noureddine had also forgotten that the two kitchen benches differed in size by some ten centimetres, meaning the sections of the cupboard designed to fit neatly over them weren’t in the right place. We couldn’t simply cut a bit out of the centre to compens
ate, because an extractor fan had to fit between the two sections.

  Then Si Mohamed pointed out that if we cut five centimetres off one side of the cupboard and moved it along, it would be in the right place. I was momentarily flummoxed, but he was right, it would work. Not perfectly but well enough. I knew Noureddine would be glad that the master carpenter, Abdul Rahim, wasn’t there to see his stuff-up.

  It wasn’t Noureddine’s greatest day. Walking home after work that afternoon, he was surrounded by three youths who pulled out knives. One of them hit Noureddine on the head with a knife handle, then they robbed him of everything he was carrying – mobile phone, money, and a few tools he’d borrowed.

  Distraught but conscious, Noureddine rushed back to Riad Zany and shouted to the men still working. Within a minute, six of them were pouring out of the door with sticks in their hands, ready to go and do serious damage to the men who’d attacked him. Perhaps fortunately, they did not find them.

  I was surprised. I had thought muggings in the Medina a rarity, but several of the workers had stories about brothers or friends being robbed in this way. It was less common for foreigners; thieves generally seemed aware that, tourism being such big business, the police would increase their efforts to find them.

  We did have one significant theft, however. One afternoon after Sandy had returned from Australia, two men from a lighting shop brought a selection of brass lanterns to the riad so that we could see them in situ. We purchased several, and after they left I noticed our iPod was missing. I’d had it on earlier, and one of the men had been left alone in the salon for a few minutes while we checked out a light in the kitchen. There didn’t seem to be another explanation, so I went to the shop with Si Mohamed to heavy the man into returning it. Naturally he denied all knowledge, which meant hours at the police station filling in forms.

  It wasn’t the loss of the iPod I regretted so much as our music collection. Not having a television, this was our one form of entertainment. The silly thing was that the thief hadn’t taken the recharger cord, and in Morocco these weren’t easy to come by. It had probably been sold on the Steps of a Thousand Thieves for a hundred dirhams, played for a few hours and then discarded when it ran out of juice.

  Then there were the more subtle attempts at filching from us. The district guardian turned up with a load of old bricks he offered to sell me for half a dirham each, instead of the usual one and a half dirhams for new ones. They were handmade and naturally I was interested. There were seven hundred bricks, he assured us. I asked my guys to count them and there were protests from both sides. It would all be fine. Didn’t I trust him? In a word, no. When the men finished counting, there were only four hundred bricks.

  ‘Someone must have taken the rest of them last night,’ said the guardian.

  Of course they had. Because I had him on the back foot, he agreed to give me a discount. I was learning to bargain like a Moroccan.

  A FRIEND OF Ayisha’s had recently given birth, and a few days before Ramadan there was a celebration, to which Sandy and I were invited. But going along wasn’t just a matter of putting on a clean blouse and a smear of lipstick; Ayisha told me it was necessary to hire a traditional Moroccan outfit.

  She took me to one of the little shops near the Attarine, where elaborate dresses hung in a rainbow of colours. They fulfilled every girl’s mediaeval-princess fantasy – shiny fabrics, floor-length, tapered sleeves, gorgeous embroidery. All that was missing was the wimple.

  Ayisha’s choice was easy – vibrant pink. I dithered over mine, and finally chose a deep purple number with a gold underskirt. Part of the deal was a wide belt with a cord tie at the back, which held the waist as firmly as a corset and accentuated the breasts.

  Ayisha prevailed upon Sandy to come as well.

  ‘But won’t it be all women?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh no, there will be lots of men,’ she promised, telling him to wear his traditional djellaba and yellow babouches.

  The evening of the party, Ayisha arrived at the riad dressed in a black leather miniskirt, high leather boots, and a tight pink T-shirt that just covered her elbows. I was taken aback; it was most unlike her usually modest Medina attire. She looked as if she were off to a London nightclub rather than a traditional Moroccan celebration. We would carry our hired glad rags and change at the party, but as we were leaving I realised that my choice of shoes was woefully inadequate. I had only a pair of flat walking sandals, running shoes, and my plastic hammam slip-ons.

  Ayisha was disbelieving that I didn’t have a pair of high heels, showing me the terribly elegant pair of black stilettos she planned to wear. Just in time, I remembered the soft leather embroidered slippers the neighbour had given me, and decided they would do.

  Sandy, already wearing his djellaba, felt as though he were off to a fancy-dress party.

  A taxi dropped us at a new block of flats on the outskirts of the Ville Nouvelle. Upstairs we were ushered into a tiny apartment whose every available space was taken up with women and babies.

  ‘Where are the men?’ Sandy asked.

  ‘They are somewhere else,’ Ayisha said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  But he was worried. A woman beside him flopped out a large breast and began to breastfeed, something that was never usually done in mixed company. It seemed that, Sandy being a foreigner, the normal rules didn’t apply. I was worried too, because all the women were wearing housedresses and nighties and looked decidedly unglamorous. Were Ayisha and I going to be the only ones in elaborate dresses?

  But I needn’t have worried. When, after a bit of chitchat, Ayisha declared it was time to change, the women shrugged off their clothes – despite Sandy’s presence – and pulled out similarly ornate outfits. Ayisha took a call on her mobile as I struggled into my dress. Another woman helped me put on the belt, pulling the strings at the back tighter than Scarlett O’Hara’s.

  We were taken up a further flight of stairs and ushered into a large room ringed with brocade-covered banquettes. There was no one in it, apart from three teenage boys mucking around with a makeshift sound system. Moments later it burst into life. The music was electronic Arab pop, cranked up so far past distortion point it hurt my ears. How was I going to stand several hours of this?

  Ayisha, quite prepared to make her own party, began dancing around the room in a hip-gyrating, smouldering kind of way. With a lack of available men to make eye contact with, she focused on Sandy and me alternately. She may not have ever actually seduced anyone, but it didn’t stop her practising.

  A short time later, Ayisha’s mother appeared and sat close by, engaged in a cosy chat with her neighbour. During a break in the music Ayisha told me they were discussing her latest prospective husband – a young man from Casablanca on whom Ayisha wasn’t keen. Watching the provocative way she danced, it was no wonder her parents were keen to marry her off as quickly as possible. She was an explosion waiting to happen.

  Slowly other guests drifted in, until there were about thirty women and fifteen children. But no men. Sandy, meanwhile, had been sitting next to me making funny observations about the guests. When a young woman in a long blue dress also began to dance in an overtly sexual way on the other side of the room, Sandy and I exchanged glances. She shook her hips and shimmied her shoulders, then tied a scarf over her bottom and began to wiggle frantically. The way she swung her long hair from side to side would have made a 1960s go-go dancer envious.

  Encouraged by this display, women young and old began to rise from the banquettes and join in. The little girls copied their older sisters, and soon the entire room was a gyrating mass of women, bumping pelvises, holding hands, openly flirting with one another. There was a palpable sense of sexuality in the air. Sandy’s eyes were on sticks. So, I thought, this is how Moroccan women party when they get together.

  Ayisha’s aunt, a plump, jolly woman with a friendly face, got me up to dance with her. Unfamiliar with the music and the rhythms, I tried my best to wiggle along, but it felt odd and unnatural,
and my efforts were more like someone having a seizure than a sexy temptress.

  It wasn’t until around one in the morning, just before the food was served, that Ayisha decided it was time for Sandy to join the men. He was hustled to an apartment in a building across the road, where a group of men had been chanting Koranic verses since sunset. Eventually they blessed a teapot, and Sandy felt hopeful of some liquid refreshment at least. But when the contents were poured it turned out to be room-temperature milk. He had missed dinner, as the men had naturally been served before the women. After another hour or so, they were each given a single date to eat. Well, it was almost Ramadan.

  There was more chanting, then the lights in the apartment went out. Was it a power failure? No, the tempo of the chanting increased and the men stood up and started to throw their heads around in a similar fashion to the women. Then the lights came back on, and everyone sat down and listened to a long sermon, musing philosophically about where Allah could be found in the electric current. Riveting stuff.

  The austerity of the men’s party was remarkable, compared to the hedonism of the women’s. The only ritualised thing the women did was go up and admire the baby at some point in the evening, and slip the mother some money. This was shortly before the food arrived – platters of lamb and prune tagine, and whole chickens with olives. After dinner, when the tables were cleared away, the dancing began again.

  The particularly uninhibited dancer in blue came over and took my hand, pulling me onto the dancefloor. Someone passed over the scarf of honour, which was tied around my bottom, and I tried my best to emulate the pelvic thrusting and shaking that my partner was doing so effortlessly. The other women started to clap, and for a few brief embarrassing moments, my bottom became the centre of attention.