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

by Suzanna Clarke

  Now, inshallah, meaning ‘God willing’, is a wonderfully useful expression. It means that things will happen in their own time, if God wills it. If I say to you I will do something, inshallah, it means that I have every intention of doing so, and if I’m prevented it’s not my fault but is Allah’s will. In Morocco, it’s no use getting impatient and frustrated by delays, or blaming people. Things simply are. So it was with the transfer document. It would appear, we kept being told, by the settlement date, inshallah.

  Obviously Allah didn’t will it, because when January came the document still hadn’t materialised. Sandy had gone to Morocco a week ahead of me, and one night he phoned to tell me the deal was off. There were about ten relatives involved, all of whom had been traced except one, and he hadn’t been heard of in years. The only alternative was taking the matter through the courts, and there was no way of knowing how long that might drag on. So we were not going to be able to live in our riad after all. I was bitterly disappointed, and even more dismayed at the thought of having to begin the search all over again.

  But Sandy was his usual optimistic self. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I have a plan B.’ He had already found another house.

  WHEN I FIRST saw Sandy’s plan B it was in the company of some half a dozen people, including David, Larbi, Nabil, and Sandy’s daughter Yvonne, who had just arrived from Ireland with her husband and two small children. Sandy had made an offer to the owners, contingent on my agreement, and everyone was waiting anxiously for my reaction. Sandy followed me around, pointing things out and saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ while I tried to make an objective decision.

  The new house was indeed a proper riad, situated at the end of an alley in one of the oldest parts of the Medina. You entered a carved wooden door, ascended some stairs in a corridor, and arrived in a lovely courtyard of about a hundred square metres, complete with an orange and a lemon tree and an attractive fountain in the centre. At one end of the courtyard was the kitchen, at the other a large salon, and on the right-hand side were doorways leading to two separate bathrooms and to a staircase to the floor above.

  On the fourth side of the courtyard was a large and unusual feature wall, the central five metres of which was recessed by a metre. A buttress descended on the left-hand side of this recess, ending in a scallop shape, in the middle of which was a small spy window. We later discovered it had unique acoustic properties, allowing anyone sitting behind it to hear even the slightest whisper in the courtyard.

  Two tiled columns stood in front of the downstairs salon, which had a set of massive decorated cedar doors. To either side of the doors were tall windows, framed with exquisite, hand-carved plaster. On the floor above this salon was another room of similar proportions, with its own set of beautiful doors.

  Above the kitchen were two rooms large enough to be a self-contained massreiya apartment with its own entrance. The tops of these walls had a band of intricately carved plasterwork inset with rare and expensive coloured glass, known locally as Iraqi glass. And the first of these rooms contained the architectural treasure of the house – a huge ceiling with a spectacular radial design of carved and painted cedar.

  ‘Museum quality,’ David informed me. ‘Truly wonderful.’

  The house was indeed gorgeous, but I seemed alone in noticing that the beautiful ceiling was sagging on one side and the end section of the massreiya appeared to be in danger of falling down. There were a multitude of other repairs needed besides.

  Anticipating my concern, Sandy had engaged the city engineer to inspect the house. What I managed to decipher of his report was amusing, but hardly encouraging.

  Bending to the level of the floors of the room left lateral façade; detachment of the beams made of wood coupled supporting the catwalk; presence of beam of iron that encouraged the cracks of the wall and the lowering of the floor; presence of cracks deep to the level of the wall façade lateral internal left supporting the floor of the aforesaid room; rot of the tips floors of wood to the level of the hamman giving on the public way; flambement to the level of the base wall and presence of humidity exaggerated caused by infiltrations of the public way toward the wall in question; detachment of the beams of the parallel walls to the wall of the giving façade on the alley; the soil of occupation of the patio is stuck out because of the roots of the trees that treaty would be necessary so that it reached the walls carriers of the building there. The physical state of the building is a little graduated and necessity of the funding works has know, including repairing the coming down of the pluvial waters.

  The ‘flambement to the level of the base wall’ sounded like a real problem. I visualised the entire thing erupting in flames like a baked Alaska. It all sounded dangerous, and horribly expensive to flx. Nor was it clear to me how one made a treaty with the trees. Wall carriers were presumably the foundations, but ‘repairing the coming down of the pluvial waters’? I guessed that meant mystified plumbers shaking their heads and doubling their prices.

  I felt hesitant. This house needed far more work than the one we had failed to buy. True, it was lovely, but I was reluctant to take on a project of such magnitude. Had I been by myself, I think I would have passed it up. Prior experience with renovations in Australia had taught me that whatever you think is needed is almost always an underestimation.

  Sandy was hovering impatiently, waiting for my decision. I put him off, saying I would think about it. He was clearly disappointed, wanting me to share his enthusiasm, but my architect father had drummed into me from an early age the need to look carefully before committing.

  The following morning, I went over the riad again with the engineer, deciphering his report, while Sandy stayed at the hotel nursing a bad case of the flu. The engineer, Salim, worked for the Agency for the Dedensification and Rehabilitation of the Fez Medina, but was more than happy to do a spot of well-paid moonlighting. He had a moustache that would have done George Harrison proud in his Sergeant Pepper days and he stroked it thoughtfully as he followed me from room to room.

  ‘What about this?’ I asked, pointing out the huge bow in the catwalk that joined the two upstairs wings, where two rotting beams were slowly parting company.

  ‘No problem,’ he replied breezily, and began drawing elaborate diagrams of how scaffolding could be placed to effect a repair. I tried to ignore the guillotine shape it seemed to resemble, although I did remember that a few months earlier a house had collapsed into a mosque, killing eleven people as they worshipped.

  Salim’s optimism was as rampant as Sandy’s, and listening to either of them you would have thought that restoring a 300-and-something-year-old house was as easy as knocking up a garden shed. Still, compared to many of the houses in the Medina, this one was in prime condition. And it did have a terrace with one of the most spectacular views in Fez, all the way down the valley to the Atlas Mountains. The panorama was breathtaking: hills covered with cube-shaped houses to the left, sweeping down to Mount Zalagh. Here and there were the spires of minarets. In the far distance was a plume of black smoke from the potteries, which burned olive pits as fuel in the kilns. If you removed the satellite dishes, the view could have been straight out of the Old Testament.

  When I returned to the hotel Sandy, through his sniffles, was still determined to be enthusiastic. ‘The house is wonderful,’ he said. ‘It’s a real find. Everything will be all right, you’ll see.’

  I decamped and went for a coffee with David, who didn’t make things easier by pointing out that the riad was a significant piece of architecture and definitely worth saving. Eventually, bowing to the inevitable, I agreed to buy it, still harbouring considerable misgivings.

  A couple of days later, we were ready to confirm the purchase. Sandy, rarely sick, had to struggle to get out of bed. He had an extremely high temperature and trouble standing. With the aid of medication, Nabil and I propped him upright long enough to get him into a taxi to the bank, to arrange our initial payment of fifty per cent of the price.

  In
Australia this would have taken all of ten minutes, but in Fez it was two complicated and frustrating hours before all the formalities were completed. The charming young bank executive was so helpful that every time a new person came through the door he would stop working on our account and switch his attention to them. It took him more than an hour to fill out our one-page form. This is how things are done in Morocco, I kept reminding myself, taking deep breaths. It was just as well my high-school French didn’t run to swear words.

  Like many people in the Medina, the vendors of the house had no bank account. Our attempts to procure a bank draft which could be cashed over the counter failed when the bank told us it needed to be made out to a specific name. We rang Larbi, who said he had no idea what the vendors were actually called.

  ‘So what do we do?’ I asked, wondering why he was getting such a healthy commission when he didn’t even know this most basic of facts.

  ‘You should get the money in cash,’ he said.

  After further delays, we were presented with a huge pile of money. We had nothing to put it in, and the bank couldn’t produce a single plastic bag, so the three of us stuffed our pockets with wads of notes and waddled out looking as though we’d done a heist.

  Back at the house, the elderly vendors were waiting in the massreiya with the scribe and his assistant. The old man sat cross-legged on the floor, dressed in a dark brown djellaba, the milky disks of his sightless eyes reflecting the light from the window. The bearded scribe was shouting alarmingly into his ear and gesticulating with a roll of parchment that resembled one of the Dead Sea scrolls. The old man’s wife looked worried.

  ‘What are they saying?’ I fretted to Sandy. In the wee small hours I had gone over my doubts about the wisdom of the venture, but now I just wanted it to happen.

  ‘No idea,’ he shrugged, struggling to focus through his feverish haze.

  Just when we needed him, Nabil had disappeared with Larbi to have a look at the house, so we could only guess, and wait.

  Down in the tiled courtyard, two sheep waited their fate at Eid al-Kbir, the Feast of the Sacrifice, in three days’ time. Callously I hoped that their blood wouldn’t stain our tiles. In the orange tree just outside the window, small birds hopped about, chirping in the cool winter sunshine.

  Nabil returned. The scribe was still shouting at the old man. ‘Can you find out what the problem is?’ I urged.

  He listened for a moment and then shrugged. ‘He’s just telling him he needs to pay his back taxes before the sale can go through.’

  That sounded harmless enough. I breathed a sigh of relief. At this point I would have paid the taxes for him.

  Finally the scribe began to read a description of the property, which might have been a verse or two of A Thousand and One Nights for all our knowledge of Darija. Nabil didn’t translate, but simply inclined his head. When the scribe had finished intoning there was a pause, and he turned his gaze expectantly to us.

  ‘Please tell the owner,’ I told Nabil firmly, ‘that we’re buying the house as is and nothing must be removed.’ We’d met expats in the Medina who’d had windows and doors stripped by the owners after the completion of sale. These items fetched big money on the antique markets of Paris and London, and we knew that the ceiling in the massreiya alone was worth more than the entire house.

  When my instruction was translated the old man looked pained. ‘Tell her,’ came the translation, ‘that if you find something embellished, then it won’t be unembellished.’

  The issue of vanishing artefacts was a pervasive one. A friend of David’s had recently bought a magnificent domed ceiling for his Fez house from an antique shop in Rabat. The workman installing it recognised it as one stolen from a house two doors down a few months before. The police were told, and the antique shop had to give the money back and pay for the reinstallation in the original house.

  But many inhabitants of the Medina had little else to sell but their doors and windows, so why put artefacts before welfare? David’s argument was that destruction of cultural heritage was short-sighted, and far greater numbers would be employed by tourism in the long run.

  It struck me that for people living in a city more than a thousand years old, their lifespan represented a brief flash. It was for their descendants’ sake that things needed to be preserved, but how do you deny anyone the right to modernise? Must they sacrifice their aspirations for the new because they live in an historically significant city?

  After the signing, which for the old couple amounted to a thumb pressed into a red stamp pad and then onto the paper, Sandy, Nabil and I unburdened our pockets of the bundles of dirhams and handed them to the scribe. He counted the notes, then his off sider counted them again before handing them to the blind owner. As the pile of money in the old man’s lap grew, so did his smile.

  ‘It’s the most money he will ever have in his life,’ Nabil said. ‘And it’s the last time he will see it.’ The couple were buying an apartment in the Ville Nouvelle and were looking forward to a bright, shiny new place where everything worked. No doubt they thought us deluded for wanting to buy their decrepit old house. I must confess that the same thought had crossed my own mind.

  The mediaeval transaction finally done, a jug and glasses appeared. ‘Great,’ said Sandy, shivering with a temperature. ‘A hot drink.’

  Actually, no. We toasted our new house with cold almond milk and cookies.

  ‘The owner wants to know where you come from,’ Nabil said, and when I told him the old man repeated the name with wonder. It was as though a pair of Martians had dropped in to buy his house.

  The old couple weren’t due to move out for six months, and when the time came to pay the second half of the purchase price, it inevitably proved more complicated than we anticipated. Back in Australia, we opened our Moroccan cheque book, which we hadn’t looked at since receiving it from the bank, and realised we had a problem. We stared at the incomprehensible Arabic, and the more we stared, the more confused we were about what went where.

  Then it occurred to us that we knew one Moroccan who lived in Brisbane, but it transpired that he had left Morocco before he was old enough to have a cheque book, and he was equally in the dark. ‘My brother back in Morocco is a notary,’ our friend said. ‘I could ask him.’

  I scanned a blank cheque and emailed it to our friend to forward to his brother. Instructions were eventually conveyed to us and I made the cheque out to the vendors. I posted it to Nabil and sent another letter to the bank manager in Fez, along with a photo of the old couple so that he could identify them and pay them the cash.

  As we had requested the vendors move out before the rest of the money was handed over, Larbi offered to organise a guardian to live in the house until I could return. At a cost of one thousand dirhams, the equivalent of about a hundred and fifty dollars, it seemed a good arrangement, especially since we didn’t want to risk losing the fabulous doors and ceiling.

  I planned to go to Fez in August to begin the restoration. It was impossible for Sandy to get time off work then, but we would be returning together seven months later. This wasn’t ideal, but at least our dream house was finally becoming a reality.

  ‘We can call it Riad Zany,’ said Sandy. Zany was my childhood nickname, so I was touched. It wasn’t particularly Moroccan, but it seemed appropriate for this eccentric venture. I was under no illusions that the restoration would be straightforward, but with patience and determination I felt we would manage, inshallah.

  THE FINAL LEG of my journey that August, from Dubai to Morocco, felt endless. It was around midday when I landed in Casablanca, and there being no plane to Fez until eleven that evening, I took the train. It rolled through the sprawling suburbs of Casablanca to the dry and dusty fields beyond. In outlying villages modern, whitewashed villas with satellite dishes rubbed shoulders with huts made of palm fronds, where plastic plugged the worst of the holes. Impoverished farmers with a donkey or two and a few chooks were trying to eke out a living on patche
s of parched soil. Freshly turned fields appeared to be sprouting crops of plastic bags, which had blown on the wind and been ploughed in.

  Then the land began to form into soft rounded shapes as the foothills of the Atlas began. Vineyards and olive groves flicked past the window, then at last I could see the outskirts of my adopted city, nestled beneath a foggy haze of wood smoke.

  I took a taxi to the Medina, gazing with pleasure at the mass of humanity flowing around me. The natives of Fez – Fassis – looked mediaeval in their djellabas and headscarves, although the colourful clothing of Moroccan women gave them a visibility on the streets that was in stark contrast to the crow-black invisibility of their counterparts in Dubai.

  I collapsed into my hotel bed as soon as I’d checked in, and by seven next morning I was at the Café Firdous opposite with a nus-nus (half espresso, half milk) and a croissant. Café culture in Morocco is traditionally male-only, but in recent times the locals have become accustomed to strange foreign women who see no shame in sitting on the street sipping coffee. I watched the men greet one another with ardent kisses on both cheeks and cries of ‘Salaam Aleikum!’ (Peace be with you!) To this came the response ‘Aleikum Salaam!’ (With you be peace!)

  Breakfast done, I strolled around the Medina, waiting for a civilised hour to collect the keys to the house. My heart lifted at the sight of a man on a donkey coming in under the Bab Bou Jeloud. Ironically, this magnificent Islamic keyhole-shaped gate, the most photographed monument in Fez, was built in 1913 by the French, to give their troops direct access to the two main streets of the Medina. The Bab Bou Jeloud replaced a copy of the Arc de Triomphe, which the French had previously built on this spot. Realising the locals would view this as provocation, a subsequent colonial administrator had it torn down and replaced with something more culturally appropriate. The gate is blue on one side, the colour that represents Fez, and green on the other, the colour of Islam.