by Tahir Shah
Just as I had been anxious at hearing of an Englishman opening a restaurant in Fès, I had wondered a little anxiously how the Café Clock’s cookbook might look. Making the shift from the experimental fluidity of a kitchen, to the restricted world of the printed page, is not easy. It’s a realm in which too many talented food writers have failed.
But what strikes me squarely between the eyes is how the author, Tara Stevens, has approached this project. From the outset she’s harnessed an astonishing perspicacity, and a clear sense of observation. Through watching, tasting, and, above all, through listening, she has brought to this book’s pages a rare and comprehensive culinary experience.
At the same time, Tara has explained how and where specific ingredients are sourced, and has clarified the ways in which they are used in the kitchens of Café Clock.
The result is far more than a cookbook. It’s a key. Immerse yourself in its pages and, in return, it will unlock a domain that’s more usually cloaked in mystery, and quite off limits to the outside world. Study the pages well, and the ancient alchemy is revealed.
N.B. Clock Book, published by 33books, 2010.
EIGHT
Cairo’s City of the Dead
MUSTAPHA SITS IN THE SHADE of a sprawling fig tree, listening to the birdsong and whisking away the flies with the end of his scarf.
Every day he sits there, in a chair he made himself from old scraps of wood, just as he’s done since his childhood seven decades ago. From time to time one of his grandchildren hurtles out of their imposing stone home, whooping and hollering into the light. The scene is so usual that it could be anywhere in Egypt, or in any corner of the Arab world. But it’s made unique by the fact that Mustapha and his family live not in a residential street, but in Cairo’s vast cemetery, Al Qarafa, The City of the Dead.
No one’s quite sure how many people live there in the sprawling burial grounds among the graves. The number banded around is anything between five hundred thousand and five million. But to the people who make it their home, the numbers don’t really matter. For Mustapha and the other families, it’s a place where they can live quietly without the outside world intruding on their lives.
Drawing a wrinkled hand over his face, Mustapha sighs.
‘I have seen a universe of life,’ he says, ‘right here in the cemetery. Birth, life, and of course I have seen death. Plenty of it. They are all parts of the same thing, a cycle that never ends.’
Asked how it feels to live amongst the dead, the old man shrugs.
‘The dead have been truer friends to me than many of the living I’ve known,’ he says breaking into a smile, ‘and in any case, they don’t have tongues wagging nonsense and lies.’
Spend a little time in the cemetery and you realize that the title ‘City of the Dead’ is something of a misnomer. In Cairo there’s not just one main burial ground, but five – the Northern and Southern Cemeteries, the Bab el Wazir and the Bab Nasr, and the Cemetery of the Great.
Viewed from a distance, and from the comfort of the city’s highways, the most impressive is the Northern Cemetery. It stretches out in a honeycomb of sand-coloured shacks. Every so often there’s a fabulous dome sticking out, hinting at a grand mausoleum hiding in the jumble of more ordinary tombs. Visitors to Cairo could be excused in thinking the expanse of buildings is just another quarter of the old city. And in a way they’d be right.
Cairo’s great cemeteries were developed at least a thousand years ago in the Fatimid era, if not before, at the time of the Arab Conquest. Egypt is of course well-known for its burial traditions. After all, the Pyramids up the road in Giza are arguably the most celebrated tombs ever created by Man. Some believe that certain beliefs dating back to Pharaonic Egypt may have survived, most notably the way that Egyptians perceive death. For many, death is not regarded as the end but the beginning, and cemeteries are not places to be avoided or dreaded, but visited and respected.
The tradition of travelling to a family grave on certain days during the calendar, and on Fridays, is a part of Egyptian culture, and in part it’s a reason that so many people live in the burial grounds. The tombs of the rich or powerful have always had guardians who attend to their families when they visit the deceased, and during the forty days of mourning after a death. Many others look after the pilgrims who flock to the city’s Sufi shrines, and to the graves of members of the Prophet’s family.
Centuries ago when the cemeteries were first established, they were far from the medina of medieval Cairo. But as the city’s urban sprawl has raged forwards like wildfire, the City of the Dead finds itself as being remarkably central. Free from the press of tenement blocks, and choking traffic, the vast burial grounds are not such a bad place to live. It’s true that the plumbing is almost non-existent, and the lack of sewerage leads to the insufferable stench during the summer heat, but there is often electricity, and a few mod cons as well.
Mustapha’s little home has a battered old television and, his pride and joy, a Chinese-made refrigerator. Keen to show them off, he pours from a two-litre bottle of Coca Cola. As elsewhere in the Arab world, hospitality to a guest is taken very seriously indeed.
‘I can keep drinks cool for days,’ he says enthusiastically.
‘Where do you buy the drinks?’
The old man waves a hand towards the end of his lane.
‘Down there… haven’t you seen all the shops?’
Far from being a place of just desolation and death, parts of the cemetery are alive with the most vibrant life. There are cafés and small restaurants, where skewers of lamb are being grilled for lunch, food stalls, barbershops and, of course, there are thousands and thousands of homes. Some people even come from outside the cemetery to buy fruit and veg, declaring that the prices are lower because there are none of the overheads that there are elsewhere.
Around the corner from where Mustapha lives, at the end of a narrow alley, thick with dust, Fatima is hanging out the laundry in the blazing spring sunshine. She seems oblivious to the fact that there are three elaborate marble headstones a few feet away, or that the skeletons of an entire family lie beneath her feet.
‘I’ve lived here all my life,’ she says, reaching for another clothes’ peg, ‘and there’s nothing usual about the cemetery. If you ask me, it’s the safest place in Cairo to live. The people are good here. There’s plenty of space, and a sense of right and wrong.’
Fatima nudges a hand towards her little son, Yussef, who’s trundling about on his trike.
‘If we lived anywhere else we would not have a yard like this, a place where the children can play safely. I thank God for providing us with this.’
The laundry dripping in the sun, Fatima leads the way into her home, a squat cinderblock shack on the west side of the yard. Her father is lying in bed in the small sitting-room, squinting at a soap opera on the TV.
Fatima brews up a pot of tea, pours it out, steam billowing from the spout.
‘My husband has a cart from which he sells sweet yams,’ she says. ‘He makes enough for us to live. And besides, we get a little money for guarding this ancestral tomb. The relatives live far from here and so they rely on us to make sure the place is kept in order and clean.’
While there are now many times more people living in the cemetery than ever before, the tradition is one that goes back centuries. Some of the mausolea found in the City of the Dead are imposing structures, built during the Mameluk and Ottoman times. A great number of them contain precious details of ornamental art. Wary of thieves, the rich have always employed guardians to watch over their family graves. It’s a system that suits everyone. The families can rest assured that the graves are kept free from desecration, and the guardians can be sure that their own families have somewhere safe, central, and affordable to live.
According to Islamic tradition, bodies are usually not covered with earth as in the West, but wrapped in muslin and lain out on their sides, facing toward the holy city of Mecca. The entrance and the staircase int
o the vault are concealed by a series of stone slabs. Above ground, the site is marked by a tombstone, set within a courtyard or covered by a mausoleum.
Large Egyptian tombs often have one or more outhouses for use by visiting relatives or caretakers. Some of them have sets of chairs kept in storage to be laid out on days when the entire family is there.
A short distance from where Fatima lives, is a dusty lane which ends in the grand nineteenth century mausoleum of a Pasha. Half way down the lane is a less opulent building, a rough brick dwelling in which a young woman is sitting on an upturned packing crate. Her name is Hasna, and she has lived in the cemetery for three years, since her husband died in a car crash.
‘After my husband’s death,’ she says, ‘my in-laws threw me out of the house. They said I brought shame on the family, because I was unable to have children. I had a friend who lives here and she told me to come. She said it was safe, that it was a place where others do not judge you, where they leave you alone. And she was right. The people who live here are mostly good, the kind of people who work hard and are pious. They respect the fact that I am alone, and they have become my family.’
From time to time Hasna gets some work sewing clothes, and sometimes cleans apartments on the other side of the city. She says she dreams of a time when she’ll be reunited with her husband. When asked if she will ever marry again, she wipes a tear from her eye.
‘I don’t ever want to be married again,’ she says solemnly. ‘Anyway, who would marry a widow?’
I ask Hasna of her greatest fear. Her faces freezes and she glances down at her lap.
‘Every day people come here and ask if there’s any space. They come from the countryside, and know that the cemetery is a cheap place to live. My great worry is that the man who rents this little room to me will throw me out onto the street, or put up the rent. If that happened, I don’t know where I would go.’
Hasna touches a hand to her headscarf and sighs.
‘Thank God most people forget that we are here,’ she says.
Hasna might be surprised if she knew the irony of her remark. In recent years foreigners visiting the Egyptian capital have become increasingly fascinated with the City of the Dead, itself a uniquely Egyptian phenomenon. Although still limited in number, a few tour operators offer visits to groups of two or three tourists at a time through the cemetery maze, so that they can see it for themselves.
Not far from Hasna’s home, a young Australian couple, Jack and Marty, are taking one such tour. Both towering and blonde, they look a little incongruous, as if they made a wrong turn on the way to the Pyramids. But they’re savouring the experience.
‘When we saw the City of the Dead from a distance,’ says Jack, ‘we just assumed it was low-income housing. And when we realized it was the cemetery, we never imagined there’d be so much life here. I’ve even seen cyber cafés. Imagine that – surfing the Internet in a cemetery! It’s as if we’re seeing a side of Cairo that’s very traditional – very Egyptian – but one that’s been hidden and inaccessible until now. I’d recommend this to anyone who wants a new take on one of the oldest cities on Earth.’
Back in his courtyard, Mustapha is hammering a nail into his homemade chair. He hits his thumb by mistake and curses.
I ask if he’s seen the tour groups in his neighbourhood. He shakes his head, glances at his injured thumb.
‘That is absurd,’ he says. ‘What kind of a fool would want to take a tour of a cemetery?’ Mustapha smiles again. ‘But I suppose it isn’t quite so foolish… after all I bet you they charge more to see the Pyramids.’
NINE
Casablanca Junk
SAÏD BEN SAÏD SITS in a pool of sunlight at the front of his shop and waits for the rush of customers, a rush that never comes.
In the darkness behind him is a treasure hoard worthy of Ali Baba. Stacked up on shelves and piled high in orderly heaps, lies an assortment of antique wares – brown Bakelite radios the size of suitcases, gramophone players and gilt clocks, graceful bronze statuettes, espresso machines, vintage posters and chamber pots. What makes the collection unusual is that it comes, almost in entirety, from the Art Deco glory days of Casablanca. The city, created as a showcase of French Imperial style and might, boomed from the ’twenties until the ’forties, when began its gradual and ignominious decline.
The little junk shop owned by Saïd ben Saïd sits at the far end of a labyrinthine flea-market in the working class quarter of Hay Hasseni, on the western edge of Casablanca. With almost no tourists attracted to the city, and few Moroccans interested in anything second hand, Ben Saïd is glum.
His passion for Art Deco tends to be met with scorn from his peers, and has certainly not made him rich.
‘Everyone here has the same dream,’ he says, wiping a hand over three days’ of grey stubble, ‘they dream of living in a new house, filled with brand new things. They look at the treasures I have collected, and they laugh!’
Soon after moving to a ramshackle mansion in Casablanca, I discovered the junk yards in nearby Hay Hasseni, and found myself drawn into a dream world of bargains. A shameless hoarder, I snapped up what others considered to be worthless junk – aspidistra stands, tea caddies and porcelain urns, all decorated with zigzag lines, silver sets of cutlery, posters, cocktail shakers, ice buckets, and tin-plate toys.
But the objets d’art are only the start.
One morning I was bemoaning the low quality of new washbasins to Saïd ben Saïd. He shook his head in despair.
‘The stuff you find downtown in the fancy shops is all rubbish,’ he said. ‘You’d better go out back behind the flea market.’ I followed his advice and came across a place with a striking resemble to the end of the world. There were heaps of twisted scrap metal fifty feet high, mountains of third-hand bricks, mahogany doors and battered window frames, and an ocean of what we might call ‘architectural salvage’.
In the middle of it all I found a lovely roll-top bath, cast iron with ball and claw feet. Inside it was a huddle of newborn puppies. Nearby there were more than a dozen enormous Art Deco washbasins, ripped out from a villa in the nick of time, before the building was torn down the week before.
As the months passed, I sniffed out Casablanca’s other affordable antique shops. There must be a dozen or so, scattered across the city, most of them hidden down back streets, awaiting the intrepid. It’s true that the arrival of a fresh-faced foreigner tends to nudge the prices up. But, in time-honoured Moroccan tradition, a little hard bargaining or feigned disinterest, can have a magical effect.
Corrosion from the Atlantic breeze, and cowboy repair jobs has taken a toll on some of the more fragile pieces. But I am constantly surprised at what has survived, and the general good condition of it all. There’s plenty of less than perfect bric-à-brac, as well as toe-cringing reproductions of Louis XIV but, for all of that, there are museum-quality gems.
Tucked away in the textile market of Derb Omar is a new and rather well-heeled gallery named Memo-Arts. The showroom has a few exquisite pieces, including a rosewood writing desk with ormolu legs, a davenport, and a pair of Art Nouveau bronze nymphs. In the middle of the room sits a magnificent grand piano from about 1925, crafted in by the celebrated Parisian house of Erard.
In the last two or three years a few high-end antique galleries have sprung up. Like Memo-Arts, or the impressive Galerie Moulay Youssef, they cater to the richest Moroccan clientele. You tend to get the feeling that people buy from them in a perverse show of wealth, rather than for their fondness of antiques. The same can be said for the two or three new auction houses, established for the local market, where the rich delight in publicly flashing their cash.
Most visitors find Casablanca bewildering in its size and scope, and few bother to spend any time there, except to change trains or to visit the great Mosque of Hassan II. On the surface, the city can seem overly European, after all it was built largely by the French. But just under the surface, there’s Morocco’s ubiquitous blend of vi
brant colour, rich aromas and sounds – donkeys braying, dogs barking, and the clamour of water-sellers pushing through the traffic.
And there is of course the allure of the Bogart and Bergman, and their Casablanca. Rick’s Café does exist, having opened recently for tourists not far from the Port. But the real flavour of that time is kept alive in the flea-markets, the junk yards and antique shops in town. Tracking them down is a way of seeing the city, and exploring hidden corners to which tourists rarely venture.
Back in the labyrinth at Hay Hasseni, Saïd ben Saïd is asleep with a newspaper over his face. He stirs at the sound of footsteps, the prospect of a customer. When asked if he can acquire a grand piano at flea-market prices, he shrugs.
‘I have a friend with a warehouse full of grand pianos,’ he says absently. ‘You can find them in any size. When the French ran away from Morocco, they left them behind in their hundreds. But who would ever want one?’
‘I would,’ I said.
The shopkeeper scratched a thumbnail to his neck, and glanced back into his Aladdin’s den.
‘Well you are wise,’ he said. ‘If there were others like you, I would be a far richer man with a far happier wife.’
TEN
Chatwin and The Songlines
ONCE IN A VERY LONG TIME you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
With such a book the impact isn’t necessarily obvious at first… but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It’s then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.