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

by Suzanna Clarke

  Adults wore new djellabas and brightly coloured babouches. Little girls ran through the streets in beaded taffeta dresses; babies were dressed in mini-djellabas and Fez hats or crowns. Walking down the freshly swept alleys of the Medina became an exercise in dodging people bearing huge trays of crescent-shaped pastries filled with almond paste, or other sweet treats being brought back from the bakeries. The souks were seething as people stocked up for the feast.

  We gave our workers the traditional few days off and a bonus. The night before the feast, I went out to a surprise birthday party for a friend while Sandy stayed home with a stomach that felt as though it didn’t belong to him. When I returned at eleven-thirty Noureddine was still hard at work assembling bed bases and banquettes for our visitors, who were shortly to descend. He had spent the last few evenings staying back to finish things, and now here he was on the eve of one of the most significant days of the Muslim calendar, long after most people were at home with their families.

  On the morning of the feast, Sandy and I got up at six and walked down to one of the old city gates at R’Cif. It was still dark and men were hurrying to the mosque, carrying rolled-up prayer mats. A few beggars were about, hoping the spirit of Eid would result in a bit of extra alms-giving. A donkey trotted past by itself, panniers bulging, and turned up a side alley. It knew exactly where it was headed.

  Along with thousands of Fassis, we were going to see in the dawn on top of the hill of Feddane L’Ghorba. We joined a river of people dressed in white.

  The first pink light was just touching the fort as we began to climb up past the cemetery, seeking footholds among the scree and rocks on the steep path. Near the summit, we could hear chanting, hoarse and guttural yet strangely melodic. It was a sound that echoed other times, other cultures. It could have been from Tibet, Thailand or mediaeval Europe.

  Once at the top, Sandy headed for the men’s entrance in the wall surrounding the compound, while I went to the women’s area. Through a keyhole gateway, more than six thousand people were trying to cram into a space that could comfortably hold only half that number, so I stayed outside the inner sanctum and found a spot against the wall. The women around me were unrolling their prayer mats, performing prostrations, then settling themselves like birds on a perch. As they took off their shoes, I saw that many of them had elaborate hennaed designs on their hands and feet.

  With typical Moroccan generosity, the woman next to me insisted I share her prayer mat, and I sat leaning back on the cold stone wall, eyes closed, feeling the warmth of the sun’s rays on my face. The women joined in the chanting, until there was a sea of sound on which I drifted, held aloft by the unified voice of thousands in a ritual older than the city itself.

  Strolling through the deserted streets of the Andalusian quarter afterwards, it seemed as though we had the city to ourselves – as if the entire population had somehow been body-snatched, leaving just the shell of buildings, like a film set waiting for the director to shout ‘Action!’ I loved those buildings of Fez, but I loved the people more. Every piece of wood and brick had been carved and crafted, carted and placed by hand.

  It was finally time for Rachid Haloui to pass judgement on the house. He hadn’t seen it in months, and while it wasn’t completely finished, it was close enough.

  Before his arrival, we’d run around in a mad frenzy moving piles of building rubbish and shoving junk into cupboards. Perhaps ridiculously, I felt nervous, but it was important to me that he liked what we’d done.

  I needn’t have worried. As soon as Rachid walked through the door, his eyes lit up. He drank in the newly plastered courtyard, the renewed catwalk, the exquisitely crafted halka. In the hammam he saw Mustapha’s precise wall of traditional bricks and the old spring that was now the basis of the hand basin. He walked around not saying very much, taking in the subtle colours and the simplicity that had been the basis of our approach. Sandy and I followed in his wake like earnest students.

  Eventually Rachid said, ‘I like the way you have worked in this house. This is very rare. You have respected not only the architecture but the spirit of this place.’

  We breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘Usually,’ Rachid went on, ‘people want to make their own fantasy, but you have not done that. You have adapted it, of course, but changed it so that anything new fits in with the old. I would like to bring other clients of mine here, to show them how it should be done.’

  Sandy and I smiled at one another, thrilled by his approval. ‘We would be honoured,’ I said.

  Later, when we were drinking tea in the downstairs salon, I asked Rachid if he was optimistic about the future of the Fez Medina and he shook his head sadly.

  ‘I have been very anxious for a long time. The Medina grew in harmony until the beginning of the twentieth century, but now acculturation has become de-culturation. The city no longer has the capacity to adapt.’

  He went on to talk about the dangers of a superficial approach to ‘rescuing’ the Medina, by those who did not fully understand what was being saved. ‘You cannot rescue something unless first you know what it should be. The other danger is this new fashion of foreigners buying houses. I have nothing against people coming and restoring, but the way they renovate and modify makes me anxious – the Medina is losing its spirit. If they come to invest money, or with an Orientalist, Arabian-nights fantasy, they do not understand it. The Medina is like a street girl. Everybody takes something but they give nothing back. It must not be a question of taste – you must respect what is. Many people come here and say, ‘It’s very nice,’ and then they remove what is nice. People who want to make a fantasy should build it somewhere else. Don’t try to do it in the Medina.’

  Was there any hope? I wondered.

  ‘At least in the Fez Medina there are fourteen thousand buildings,’ Rachid said, ‘whereas Marrakesh has only four thousand, which may mean Fez has a greater degree of resilience. Here we have a chance, unique in the world, to live as they did in the fourteenth century. We can make it more comfortable, of course, but we don’t have the right to change it fundamentally. It should not become a theme park.

  ‘This city is also about emotion,’ he went on. ‘Following an old man in a djellaba down an alley, with everything close and dark, wondering where you’re going. Then you enter a house, a courtyard, and see something jaw-dropping. I’m fifty-four and I never come to the Medina without discovering something new.’

  And then we were packing to leave. Si Mohamed would look after the house until we returned the following year. Departing was such a wrench, we were tempted to rearrange our lives so we could live in Fez full-time. Sandy had resolved to resign from the radio station and come back to Fez for a few months a year until I could join him. But I wasn’t ready to give up working yet – there were still things I wanted to do, and one of us needed to earn an income.

  We had a special thankyou lunch for the workers, who were in high spirits and toasted the house with mint tea. We’d managed to organise work for our regular team with another expat, but they promised to try to come back to us for the next stage – repairing the massreiya. Sandy had set up a website for the plasterer, who was getting a continual stream of work as a result.

  The day we left, they phoned us from their new place of work, the mobile being passed around to wish us trek salaama – safe travel. They chattered on happily in Darija and I had no idea what they were saying, but I understood the sentiment. Having shared our lives with them for so long, they felt like family. We would miss them all.

  Piling our luggage into a taxi at R’Cif we set off to the train station. Near the main street in the Andalusian quarter, the driver was forced to slow to a crawl to avoid a man performing an exuberant dance, arms akimbo, in the middle of the road. He was a tall thin ragged figure, and his face was suffused with the ecstasy of being alive. I had no idea why he was dancing there, but I knew exactly how he felt.

  Afterword

  WHEN SANDY RETURNED the following Fe
bruary to supervise the remaining work, Mustapha and his team were overjoyed to see him. Each of them gave him a huge hug and kissed his cheeks repeatedly. On their first day back they made a tour of the riad, pointing out to one another things they had done. The pride they felt in the house was evident.

  Even Tigger returned, as Peter and Karen were departing once more for Australia. She did not seem in the least fazed to find herself back in her old haunts, and immediately started chasing sparrows.

  A local Sufi brotherhood, the Hamadcha, offered to bestow Baraka, a blessing, on Riad Zany, and one Sunday night, fifty guests and twelve musicians packed into the courtyard. Most of the guests were Moroccan, and after a couple of hours the ceremony reached the point where many had danced themselves into a light trance. Several of the women progressed to a frenetic deep trance, including Ayisha, who danced so wildly she needed to be restrained by three people. It was as if she truly were possessed by a djinn, and after she collapsed she said she remembered nothing of the experience.

  A local restaurateur made food for everyone in our kitchen, and the following morning the house was a chaotic mess. There came an unexpected knock on the door: it was the decapo ladies, Fatima and Halima, insisting that Sandy leave while they cleaned the place.

  Although I was sorry not to be at the ceremony, I received a multitude of emails and photos from people who attended, telling me how much I was missed. Even on the other side of the world, I too felt blessed.

  A view over the Fez Medina, with the green-tiled roof of the Karaouiyine Mosque in the foreground

  The view from our terrace

  The downstairs salon on the day we purchased the house

  Looking through the Bab Bou Jeloud into the Medina

  Local women do their shopping in the vegetable souk at R’Cif

  One of Fez’s last surviving brocade makers

  ‘Liberace’, at the café where he’s worked for forty years

  Perfume oils and sacred and medicinal herbs for sale

  The courtyard, for many months our living room, was in constant chaos

  The decapo ladies, Fatima and Halima, whose work revealed the beauty of the cedar beneath up to seven layers of paint

  The first of many deliveries of lime and sand that were to continue for months

  The kitchen stripped bare. The outline of the old window shows where it once joined the house next door.

  Putting zellij on the kitchen floor

  The difficult and dangerous task of lifting the catwalk balustrade into place

  Looking down into the completed courtyard

  After months of work, the courtyard is finally complete

  The finished downstairs salon. The door at the end leads to the main bathroom, the door on the right to the courtyard

  The view looking up from the kitchen through the completed halka

  The kitchen, finished at last.

  With thanks to David, who enabled Riad Zany to become a reality; Simon and Fred for sharing their knowledge of Sufism; Kareem for his research on circumcision rituals; Karima for her translations; Helen for her timely advice; Meredith for her wonderful editing; and to all the Riad Zany team for their time, effort and energy.

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  Published in 2008 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

  A Random House Group Company

  First Published by Penguin Group (Australia) in 2007

  Text and Photographs Copyright © Suzanna Clarke 2007

  Suzanna Clarke has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

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  ISBN 9780091925222

  The names of some people in the text have been changed to protect their privacy