by Tahir Shah
One morning, the owner of the guest-house lurched up the stairs and asked if I wanted to buy a house.
'My cousin is selling,' he said.
'What kind of place is it?'
'A nice one . . . old, very old.'
'How old?'
'Five hundred years.'
'What state's it in?'
'Go and see for yourself.'
He made a telephone call and, as soon as he replaced the handset, his cousin popped up. He was called Badr and was dressed like a rock star, his hair spiked up with gel, clothed in denim, with a lot of gold chains and pungent aftershave. Badr moon-walked through the medina's streets. He said he had watched Michael Jackson videos continuously since he was six and had perfected his hero's moves. I had to run to keep up, dodging the oncoming traffic: an endless flow of mules laden with crates, old men pushing barrows, and wide Fassi women weighed down with their shopping.
From the guest-house we walked straight ahead for a while, turned left, then right, then right again, and left, then right, right again, left, another left, and straight, until we came to a small olive-green door.
Badr slapped it with his hand. The door opened.
'Go on in,' he said.
I stepped down and, finding myself in a blacked-out corridor, fumbled my way forward and round a sharp bend, and emerged into a courtyard, blinded by sunlight. On three sides there were towering double doors leading to rooms, and in the middle a marble fountain. Above the courtyard was a second storey, with another three rooms and a wrought-iron balcony. The walls had once been adorned with hand-cut mosaic in red, yellow and black.
Damp laundry criss-crossed the courtyard, hung up on strings. From what was hanging there you could imagine how many people, and who, resided in the building. There must have been at least four women, three men and six children living there.
'You have a big family,' I said.
Badr did a break-dance move fast.
'I will show you the tomb,' he said.
'Tomb?'
'That's right.' He opened a door on the opposite side of the yard, pulled out a box filled with old shoes, and a broken chair. 'In here.'
I poked my head inside. It was very dark. Badr fetched a candle, lit it and pushed past me. There was a small cavity, ten feet by ten, with a stone slab in the middle.
'Who's buried down there?'
'The founder of the house.'
'Was he a relative of yours?'
Badr squinted. 'Not sure,' he said.
The idea of living with a tomb in the house was original but unnerving.
'I don't think my wife would like having a dead person in the house,' I said.
'There's another place,' Badr said fast, 'another cousin. It's bigger.'
'Where is it?'
'Not far.'
We left the tomb, shuffled back through the blacked-out corridor and into the street. Badr winked at a veiled girl who was peering out from the house opposite. She shouted something loud in Arabic and pointed to the sky.
A few minutes later we were crossing a second threshold. I turned the corner and found myself in a courtyard filled with orange trees. A pair of shrivelled women were sitting outside one of the salons. They stood up, gave greeting and invited us to look round.
Badr led me up one of the two flights of stairs to the roof. In Fès, houses are built on multiple levels, with a clutch of rooms arranged on each floor. Any recess too small for human habitation tends to be filled with a spider's web of junk. On the way up, we passed a dozen or more bedrooms, each one lined with sofas and beds. There was a colour television in each one, blaring soap operas from Egypt.
A small flap opened on to the roof. We struggled to get through it. There were three chicken coops up there, a pair of dogs and what looked like a tractor engine. I gazed out across the medina, where each house had a central halqa, an opening to the sky, and nestled cheek by jowl to the houses round it. Badr pointed to the distance.
'One day I'll live over there in the new town,' he said.
'And leave all this history behind?'
'History's for my parents and their friends,' he said.
'You've lived here all your life. So you don't see the beauty.'
'There is no beauty here; there's just dirt and damp.'
'I know people who'd give their front teeth to live here,' I said.
'Who?'
'People who appreciate history.'
'Tell them to come here, then,' said Badr. 'There are plenty of people who want to sell their family homes.'
We traced our way back down through the house, past the rooms alive with television. I made a joke, asking if there was a tomb there as well. Badr said there wasn't a tomb.
'But there's a big kitchen. I will show you.'
We stepped down into a kind of cellar. It was dim and stank of dead rats and damp. The ceiling was falling in. There was a pool of light at the far end.
'That's the kitchen down there,' said Badr.
'And what's this room we're standing in?'
'These are the slave quarters,' he said.
TWENTY-THREE
I have never seen a man lost on a straight path.
Saadi of Shiraz
WALEED TOOK ME ASIDE AND TOLD ME HIS SISTER WAS DEAD. WE were sitting in a café in the new town, waiting for another of his cousins to turn up.
'Her name was Amina,' he said softly. 'She was two years older than me, a student with perfect school grades and very nice teeth.'
'I'm very sorry to hear she's passed away. When did it happen?'
Waleed the memory man crossed his arms and stared into his coffee.
'It's not an easy question to answer,' he said.
I changed the subject, asked him about his children. He broke into a smile.
'There is Ali, who's seven, and Dounia. She's five. They are like sunshine on a cold day,' he said.
'Raising kids is a big responsibility.'
'Children are like clay: it's for us to mould them.'
Waleed seemed pleased with his analogy.
'Values are important – a sense of right and wrong,' I said.
'They must understand the beauty of honour and the ugliness of shame.'
Waleed's cousin swept in, ate three croissants and left. He didn't say a word.
'He seemed nice,' I said when he was gone.
'He was very close to my sister,' said Waleed. 'They were supposed to get married. Both families were planning the marriage.'
'It must have been very hard for him when she died.'
Waleed nodded. He put his head in his hands.
'It was terrible,' he said. 'My sister was very lovely deep down. The shame, the shame.'
'I don't understand,' I said. 'What has shame got to do with it?'
Waleed raised his head. His eyes were full of tears.
'Amina disgraced us, brought great shame on the family. We are laughed at by everyone,' he said.
'How could people laugh when your sister died? That's so callous.'
Waleed didn't look at me. He raised his glass, staring at the pattern on the rim, and said: 'Amina eloped with a Frenchman. She lives in France.'
'You mean she's not dead?'
'In our eyes she is,' said Waleed.
Word spread through Fès that I was searching for a house to buy. It wasn't strictly true. I dreamed of owning an old courtyard home in the medina, but I knew Rachana wouldn't be gripped by the idea. And, besides, we didn't have any money to spare for frivolities. As far as Rachana was concerned, the Caliph's House was already far too big.
Waleed's cousins saw it as their duty to find me a suitable home. Their enthusiasm to help me realize my dream was fuelled by a lust to see their own communal dream come true, the dream of leaving the medina and moving into the new town.
That afternoon, another cousin took me on a tour of houses so deep in the old city that it seemed as if the modern world had never quite penetrated. The tourists who come to Fès tend to do a circuit of the
main historical sights. They rarely journey into the inner regions of the labyrinth.
Waleed's cousin Abdur Rahman said that every house was for sale.
'Without the foreign money the city will collapse,' he said. 'It's already falling down.'
He was right. Hundreds of buildings were supported by wooden buttresses and scaffolding. As families have grown, additional floors have been added on to the top of old buildings, applying massive downward pressure, which has pushed out the walls. We must have visited twenty houses in the space of a morning. The different buildings all melted together in my head, a tapestry of fountains, mosaics, balconies, carvings and painted wood, orange trees and marble floors.
I wasn't going to ask about Waleed's sister, Amina, but Abdur Rahman mentioned her name.
'She was seventeen,' he shouted as we waded through a herd of pack mules heading towards us. 'She was the favourite and was very loved. Waleed's parents had planned to marry her to another of our cousins. They had been engaged as children.'
'I met him,' I said.
'He doesn't say much,' said Abdur Rahman, 'and Amina thought he was boring. She ran away to France with a guy she met at McDonald's.'
'I can imagine the family being angry.'
'No, no,' he replied. 'You can have no idea how angry they were. They beat their chests, wept, screamed, tore out their hair. Then they did the hardest thing of all.'
'What?'
'They buried their dead daughter.'
In the afternoon, I bumped into Twigger. He was haggling with a shopkeeper for a pair of embroidered mule panniers. I asked him if he had a mule to go with the baskets.
'All in good time,' he said. 'You have to go slow. I've been bitten by the used-mule business before.'
'In Morocco?'
'No, in Outer Mongolia. Got ripped off big-time. The secondhand mule business is always run by thieves.'
'What's the secret of a good pack mule?'
'You've got to check for sores.'
'Where?'
'Everywhere, but especially on the rump and down the back,' he said. 'If you see sores, walk away. However sweetly the damn mule looks at you, walk away. When you're buying a used mule you can't get too attached.'
Twigger threw down a wad of low-denomination dirham notes and grabbed the leather panniers.
Then he asked if I wanted to buy a palace.
'It's round the corner,' he said.
'How much?'
'The price of a broom cupboard in London or New York.'
Two minutes later we were inside the great salon of a vast family home. There were three principal courtyards with four cavernous rooms off each, marble fountains long since dry, and the very finest painted cedar ceilings. The walls in each room were panelled with mosaic to six feet up from the floor, millions of hand-cut pieces laid in geometric patterns.
The house was empty, except for an old man who used the upper drawing room as a workshop for making sandals. He lived in the same room with a flock of pet doves. The birds nested in a cavity behind the fabulous painted ceiling. Every so often, one of the birds would swoop through the room. The place was splattered with decades of bird excrement.
The shoemaker said he never went outside.
'Don't you go shopping in the medina?' I asked.
'Oh, no, no,' he said fearfully. 'I never, ever go out there.'
'How do you get food, though?'
'A neighbour goes for me.'
'How long have you lived here?'
'Since I was born . . . sixty years ago.'
'Do you realize you live in a palace?'
'This is my home,' he said.
'But it's a palace.'
'Is it?'
Where are your family?'
The man threaded a needle with twine. He didn't look up.
'Those birds up there are my family,' he said.
Just before we left Fès, I was strolling through the medina, taking pictures of the traditional artisans turning sheets of metal into exquisite appliqué lamps, when I spotted a shop front. It was out of place. Fès's medina has a worn-in appearance, a uniformity reached through more than a thousand years of life. The shop front stood out because it was impeccable and because it gave no hint of the wares on offer. The only clue was a small black-and-white sign hanging in front of the door. It read: 'Services'.
I couldn't resist going in.
A fresh-faced young man was sitting inside. He was boisterous and big, and it looked as if his shirt was about to split down the back like the Incredible Hulk. His giant hands were holding a miniature Bible, his lips reading the words silently. There was a guitar in the corner with a rainbow-coloured strap.
When the door opened, the giant looked up, sat straight with a jerk and greeted me. I enquired what services were on offer. He removed his reading glasses with both hands and placed them on the desk.
'We connect people,' he said in a well-mannered Southern voice.
'Are you an agency?'
'Um, yes, sir, you could kinda call us that.'
'What's your product?'
'The Truth.' The giant placed his hand on the Bible and grinned. 'We're in the wisdom business,' he said.
At the guest-house, Waleed insisted the shop was known throughout Fès.
'I told you before,' he said. 'We Moroccans are quiet people. We love all religions. They are our brothers. It says in the Holy Qur'ān that if you cannot find a mosque you should go and pray in a church. Our Book says that Moses and Jesus are prophets and must be respected,' he said. 'We live peacefully. You have seen us. But, Monsieur, you must understand we do not have a place for these people.'
'Which people?'
'These Happy Clappering people.'
We left Fès and drove northeast on one of the windiest roads I have ever experienced. Ariane and Timur swayed about in the back. They played 'I Spy' for a while and then both threw up. I pulled over so that we could sponge them down and they could go for a pee. I took Timur into the undergrowth at the side of the road and pulled down his trousers. All around us was a forest of thick, healthy stems. Most of them were about four feet high. They were marijuana plants.
Morocco's Rif is famous for kif, marijuana resin. The crop supplies much of southern Europe since it was discovered in the sixties by a tie-dye generation, travelling in multicoloured Volkswagen camper-vans. The police are in force these days, arresting tourists foolish enough to smuggle the resin home.
Northern Morocco couldn't make for a sharper contrast from the south. Gone was the desert, replaced by a patchwork of fields, tilled by bent-over women wearing conical hats. There were orange groves and farmsteads, ripe old men astride tired old donkeys, rocky outcrops, clear streams and oceans of sheep.
In the flaxen light of late afternoon, we approached Chefchaouen, a small town built by Muslims fleeing from Andalucia five centuries ago. It sits cradled between two summits, above the Oued Laou valley. Entering it was like stepping into a lost fragment from Andalucian Spain. The place was designed as a secure citadel for the Islamic faith, a mainstay from which its forces could regroup and plan their assault on Portugal, the rising Catholic power.
The town's architecture, cuisine and unlikely Mediterranean feel are results of its curious Latin heritage. Until 1920, when Spanish troops occupied northern Morocco, Chefchaouen was cut off from the Christian world. The invading Spanish found a time capsule of their own culture. They heard spoken a form of tenth-century Catalan – a language brought south by Andalucian Jews – which had died out on the Iberian peninsula four hundred years before. And they found Granada leatherwork, pottery and other crafts long extinct from their native Iberia.
The streets were steep and cobbled, shaded by trellises overlaid with clematis, the houses rinsed with indigo, their doors studded, their roofs tiled with terracotta. We strolled up and down the medina's alleys, struck by the tranquillity.
I had visited Chefchaouen the year before, on the trail of an American convert to Islam. He was called Pete
and had travelled to Morocco in search of a young woman he had met in a Texan nightclub. Unlike most of the foreigners who travel to the mountain town, Pete had no interest in kif. There was only one thing on his mind – the expansion of a radical Islamic message.
I had tried to explain to him that Islam preaches moderation, that the religion had been hijacked by terrorist forces, as every genuine Muslim knows. But Pete had been sucked into a sub-world of hatred, a realm awash with old-fashioned anarchy.
Rachana, the children and I sat at a café on Chefchaouen's main square, Uta el-Hammam. We ate Spanish tortilla followed by soupy blue ice cream. I found myself thinking about the Happy Clappers. They may not have found any followers in a staunchly Muslim country like Morocco, but their message – the Bible – has a remarkable cultural value that is sometimes overlooked. Until the Second World War, the majority of Christians attended church services on Sundays. They did it without
question and were exposed to a body of work rich in stimulation and in storytelling. The Old Testament in particular was drummed into young minds by preachers and vicars on both sides of the Atlantic, stressing moral values and correct behaviour, against a backdrop rich in symbolism.
Churchgoers on a Sunday morning learned how to dissect a story and grasp its inner meaning, just as Arabs still do expertly today. Sitting in their pews, Christians were surrounded by an extraordinary tapestry of symbolic material. There were symbols in the sermon, in the wall hangings and the stained glass, in the carvings on the pulpit and in the wine and the wafer, the blood and the body of Christ.
These days the young generation are enlightened in so many ways, but symbols are something they hardly know, except in computing. They have become separated from an ancient kind of thinking, oblivious to symbolism in religion, in stories and in art. The chain has been broken, so it's no wonder a young man or woman may not understand what a wafer has to do with the body of Christ, or what a sip of watered wine has to do with His blood.