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

by Suzanna Clarke

  Jenny and I raised our eyebrows. ‘We want a careful job done,’ I emphasised.

  ‘Oh, all right, two weeks then,’ he replied.

  Either Omar was Superman or he planned on bringing fifty sets of hands in. Or perhaps he was saying whatever he thought would get him the job. Whatever, he was at the top of our list of possible builders, although the only other name on the list was a one-eyed seventy-year-old who hadn’t shown up.

  Omar took us to see another house he was working on, a project with which an Australian man we knew had been involved for a while, before he fell out with the owner. I rang him to get the low-down.

  ‘Omar will be trouble for you guys,’ he said.

  It seemed Omar was a good builder but he could slip up through inattention and he was money-hungry. What builder wasn’t? I wondered. The price Omar had quoted us seemed ridiculously cheap, but we planned to pay a day rate so he couldn’t rush the job.

  Our friend had some good advice: we should also pay a monthly bonus to keep Omar on track and prevent him going off to someone else’s better paying job in the interim. We’d need to buy the tools for his team ourselves, and most of these would go walking if we didn’t keep an eye on them, along with our mobile phones and anything else we had lying around. I had a vision of hordes of heavy-footed, light-fingered tradesmen invading our peaceful space, and felt a shiver of apprehension. Still, if not Omar then who?

  But when we made him an offer he would only take a job rate, saying he wanted to be free to do other work. Just what we didn’t want, someone who showed up for a day and then disappeared for five.

  I had an awkward loose end to tie up: telling Hamza we wouldn’t be engaging him to manage the restoration. I had been dreading this, not least because Hamza and his carpenter hadn’t yet returned to assess the work we were still owed. If Hamza was no longer involved, there wouldn’t be much incentive to ensure the work was finished.

  But I needn’t have worried. Hamza was gracious and affable. I started by saying that I knew he was terribly busy. Yes, he conceded, he was indeed busy. And, I continued, we knew his work was wonderful but his price was out of our league. We simply couldn’t afford him. I saw him relax when I said this. I think he was secretly relieved that he didn’t have to take on yet another job.

  He was probably also thankful not to have me for a client. I’m the hands-on type who wants to know everything, that building managers dread. Most would prefer you to give them the money and then bugger off until the job is finished, with maybe an occasional pretend consultation before they go right ahead and do what they were going to anyway.

  My meeting with Hamza ended amicably, our friendship intact, and I left feeling much relieved. He promised to come to the riad with his carpenter in the next few weeks to sort out the rest of the work.

  LIFE IN THE Medina had its surprises. One evening around nine, there was a knock on the back door. As Sandy was out I ignored it, but then came insistent raps on the front door.

  ‘Madame Suzanna,’ a voice called out, echoed by that of a child.

  I suddenly realised who it was and ran to let them in. Khadija was full of emotion, hugging me and showering kisses, and Ayoub turned his face up to be kissed. Our conversation was as complicated as ever, with her French worse than mine, but eventually her story came out.

  Khadija’s family had not moved to the countryside after all, but to a suburb on the outskirts of Fez. Her husband had lost his job and they had to move somewhere cheaper. As Abdul had seemed permanently stoned and was pretty haphazard when it came to work, I could well imagine that his employer had had enough of him. Khadija was still embroidering slippers at home for a pittance to support the family. She asked if I had any cleaning work for her.

  Having decided against employing Damia again, it was a timely request. And if things worked out I could probably find Khadija more work with other expats. I gave her the sheets I’d brought from Australia and she was thrilled. I think it was probably the first set of sheets she’d owned in her life. Ayoub was ecstatic about his paint set and immediately started using it. He would be starting school next year, Khadija told me, and she couldn’t wait to have some free time to herself.

  Their new place was an even tinier room in another shared house, and I gathered her son was driving her to distraction, and making it hard for her to do her embroidery. I thought, but didn’t say, that having Abdul at home all day couldn’t be helping.

  Khadija came to clean a few days later, and all was well for the first hour. Then her dopey husband turned up with Ayoub in tow. He sat at the table chain-smoking and chattering incessantly, preventing her from doing her job properly. I didn’t understand why, if he was out of work, he couldn’t mind Ayoub somewhere else and let Khadija get on with it.

  Abdul’s presence also hindered my own work, a spot of editing for Sandy, who was on a tight publishing deadline with a novel. When Australian friends dropped in for a cup of coffee Abdul was taking up one of our scarce chairs. He eventually had the good grace to move, but sat two metres away on the edge of the fountain, staring intently while we talked.

  After Khadija, Abdul and Ayoub had left, I noticed that a bright yellow hand towel was missing from the kitchen. It had been hanging in the centre of the wall at eye level, and the three of them were the only people besides us to have been in the kitchen that morning. It was such a stupid thing to steal that I wondered whether Khadija thought I hadn’t paid her enough. Yet I had given her as much for three hours work as Abdul used to get for eight hours as a parking attendant. Sandy suggested she’d taken it home to wash, but it never reappeared. I hoped Abdul had been the one to take it, but there was no way of knowing for sure. I didn’t care about the towel itself; it was the betrayal of trust that disappointed me.

  Khadija turned up a few more times. I gave her tea but I didn’t offer her any more work. She asked if we would employ Abdul on our restoration, but he hadn’t a hope in hell. Eventually she stopped coming, and the last time I saw her was five months later, when she was pregnant once more.

  While things with Khadija didn’t work out, my friendship with Ayisha was flourishing, and we took to going to the hammam together. To get to her favourite one we had to walk through an area of the Medina called Ras Jnaan, which meant ‘top of the garden’. Hundreds of years ago, it was the site of the market gardens that supplied the city. As Fez expanded, wealthier people moved from the city centre to build grand houses at Ras Jnaan, displacing the gardens. Now the area was forlorn and neglected, its houses in varying degrees of ruin.

  Walking uphill, we clambered over a pile of rubble from a recently collapsed dwelling that was blocking the alley. Half of the house still stood, a surreal cross-section with stairs that led nowhere and floors abruptly cut in two.

  Further along, Ayisha pointed to a large dar on a corner where a friend of hers had lived when they were children. The family had moved away now and the house was uninhabited, its massive carved doors padlocked. I longed to go inside and take a look, and wondered whether someone would rescue it before it fell into terminal decline.

  The house was so big and its corridors so dark, Ayisha confided to me, that she had been too terrified to stay overnight.

  ‘I imagined the djinns were waiting for me,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me about these djinns,’ I prompted. ‘I’ve heard they live underground?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ she laughed. ‘I don’t really believe in all that stuff.’

  ‘I’m not asking if it’s true or not. Just what people around here believe.’

  She narrowed her eyes at me, as if assessing whether to go ahead, then nodded slowly. ‘Well, some people think that if you go to a ruined building at night you’ll see the djinns, and they’ll hurt you. There are some houses nobody wants to live in because they’re haunted. If you go there djinns can enter your spirit and possess you, and if that happens you don’t sleep well. If you’re still single you cannot get married. And if you are married you won’t have
children.’

  I was intrigued. ‘So what are they like, djinns? Are they the same as what we call ghosts, the spirits of dead people?’

  She looked doubtful. ‘Djinns are a kind of spirit, but they are independent beings, made by Allah from fire that does not smoke. Some people say they live under the ground, in communities. They are both male and female, with names and families, and they live much longer than us. They have their own stories. And they can be in conflict with each other, just like us. Djinns share everything with you, but they do things in the opposite way. They sleep during the day and come out at night. They find their way out into our world through places where there is water. That is why you must cover your drains.’

  Moroccan squat toilets are plugged with stoppers, and drainage holes in floors and courtyards are covered with pieces of marble or large stones. I had always assumed that this is to prevent rats and cockroaches coming up from the sewers.

  Ayisha’s face showed how much she was enjoying this role reversal, the young woman imparting wisdom to the older. ‘If you pour boiling water down drains or in the cracks in the floor you can hurt the djinns. Then you will be punished.’

  Reaching the hammam, we stripped to our knickers, paid for and collected our buckets and went into the inner room to fill them.

  ‘You cannot leave your children alone or a djinn might possess them,’ Ayisha said thoughtfully as she scrubbed herself. ‘Their faces will change, everything will change. They will grow up differently. I once saw a girl, only eight months old, crying in such an ugly voice. Nothing about her was normal. Her mother said she had left her for a few moments to go to the fountain in the street, and when she came back the child was in this state.’

  ‘Couldn’t the mother do anything?’

  ‘She went to see a fakir, a Sufi who knows magic, and he told her to put her baby in a dirty, deserted place at night so the djinn would have a chance to return to its own kind. But the mother could not leave her daughter all alone for a night, and said she would accept her as she was. It was Allah’s will.

  ‘If someone is mentally disturbed,’ Ayisha went on, ‘and talks to himself and does strange things, people think he is possessed by a djinn and can harm you.’ She paused, unsure whether to continue, and when she did it was in a low, embarrassed whisper. ‘Once, a few years ago, it was very hot and I was sleeping on the terrace with my mother. At two-thirty in the morning I opened my eyes and in front of me I saw a thin black man. As I watched he started to grow very, very tall. I was so afraid I could not speak, I could not cry out. I don’t believe in djinns but I saw him. From that day on I could not sleep there.’

  She covered her eyes at the memory and I could see she was disturbed by it. Time to change the subject.

  ‘Are there other sorts of spirits besides djinns?’

  ‘There are marids – they are the most powerful type of djinn. They are proud and arrogant. They are called blue djinns because their skin is blue and their hair always looks wet and wavy, as though they are under water. There are also mlouks, who can possess you simply because you are beautiful, or different in some way, or because they want what you have. So if you are different you better watch out.’

  ‘And can people ever have friendships with djinns and those other spirits?’

  ‘Yes. To make friends with djinns, you offer them milk or powdered henna, or burn incense. But you need to be careful because they have many tricks. If you need help you go to a fakir, and he will call on a marid. If I take a fakir a photo of the person I want to marry, he will ask a marid to fill this person’s thoughts with me. Or if I have an enemy the marid can make trouble for them.’

  Ayisha took a breath and followed this story with an even more extraordinary one. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘women will go to the cemetery and dig up the body of a newly buried person and cut off the hands. They use the hands to make couscous for someone they do not like. They give it to them as a present, and once that person eats the couscous he will never be happy again. He may even get sick and die. It is a curse.’

  I’d never heard anything so macabre. ‘But how do they use the dead hands to make couscous?’

  ‘They take them home and wash them, then they hold them like so.’ Ayisha reached across and took one of my hands in hers, stroking my palm with that of her other hand, as if rubbing butter through couscous.

  I made a mental note to look twice at any unsolicited plates of couscous that appeared on our doorstep in future. Such a supernatural method of revenge cast neighbourhood disputes in a whole new light.

  Ayisha’s stories offered an insight into why women crowded around stalls in the souk that sold powders and potions, dried lizards, the skins of rare and endangered animals, live turtles and chameleons. They were seeking magical solutions to their problems from people they respected. Were they greatly dissimilar to those Westerners who bought endless self-help books, or tuned in to Dr Phil and Oprah for advice?

  Just as Sandy and I were starting to feel completely despondent about our lack of a builder, fearing we were never going to get started, let alone finished, our luck turned. David rang to tell us about a wonderful builder who’d just become available; the project he was working on had stalled because of lack of money. Mustapha had worked on David’s dar for six months the previous year, and was careful with sensitive preservation work such as ours. But he could be slow, David warned.

  When Mustapha came to the door of Riad Zany I liked him immediately. He had a round, jolly face that made you want to smile, was dressed in a djellaba and skullcap, and was the epitome of gracefully aging Muslim respectability. He greeted me by gripping my hand in both of his. He was intelligent, assured and upbeat, and we felt confident about him, the more so since he’d been recommended by David, who was extremely particular.

  Mustapha was willing to work on a day rate and we asked how much he wanted. It was a bit more than we’d budgeted for, but I reminded myself that we were talking about the equivalent of a few extra dollars a day. I said we needed to have the work finished in five months, to which he responded, ‘That is a very short time,’ a huge contrast to Omar’s brash over-confidence. We happily engaged him to start at the end of May.

  We had now hired the three people most important to the riad’s future: Rachid, Mustapha, and the engineer, a woman called Zina. When we called a meeting a few days later Zina arrived wearing tight white pants and a green top with a black linen surcoat. She had streaked hair, heavy eyeliner, and high wedge shoes with diamantes. Needless to say, she also had a forthright manner, and she and Mustapha hit it off immediately. They had never met but had grown up in the same part of the Medina, and had animated conversations about what had happened to old so-and-so.

  ‘I like this man,’ Rachid declared, slapping Mustapha on the back. He and Zina had decided that Mustapha knew what he was talking about when it came to repairing houses, so they could relax.

  We were standing on the terrace discussing how best to fix the catwalk, which had a rotting supporting beam, when some women leant over from the neighbouring house and asked Rachid something in Darija. The next moment all three were off racing downstairs and into the street like beagles after a scent. I followed at a more leisurely pace and discovered that one of the women had a house for sale and wanted them to see it. It was a nice little dar but unfortunately had been severely messed with – there was lots of badly applied paint and cheap tiles.

  ‘This is just what I like,’ said Rachid, tongue in cheek. I had to remind them all that they were doing a job for me, and reluctantly they dragged themselves away. We needed to see another neighbour to discuss repairing a shared wall, and had a great deal of difficulty locating their front door. Fassi houses are interwoven like some intricate puzzle, in a Lego method of construction. Our kitchen is partially over someone else’s, and a neighbour’s bedroom protrudes along one side of our courtyard, with one of our bedrooms on top of theirs in turn.

  This sharing of space rarely involves being able to
see into other people’s homes, but it hints at the spiderweb of relationships that existed between the families who built and modified these houses over hundreds of years. Need a bit of quick cash? Flog off part of your house so the neighbour can build an extra room.

  Our neighbour’s door turned out to be in a completely different alley. We knocked and were answered by a woman who was understandably wary of a crowd of strangers, even if three of them were Moroccan, and she wasn’t going to let us in for a moment. There was nothing wrong with her house, she said, she just wanted us to go away.

  Mustapha asked to speak to her husband, but she told him he would only say the same thing. It was dispiriting, because we needed to see what was happening on the other side of our cracked wall. Since we were the ones paying to fix it, I’d have thought she’d be only too keen.

  Zina had to leave for another appointment but Rachid stayed for a coffee, which gave me a chance to ask him why Fassi houses had developed the way they did.

  ‘The Medina has grown without an urban plan,’ he said. ‘It followed agriculture and irrigation. Water finds its own way, and the Medina developed in a pattern like the veins in a leaf. The first roads were built next to the river because this was what people walked beside. They went there to get water for cooking or for their animals or to grow tomatoes. As areas further out were irrigated, people moved there, and as the canals and the streets running alongside them became smaller, they became increasingly private.’

  I liked the image of the Medina as a leaf, with the central vein being the main route, and this leading into smaller ones, which were the derbs, or the private spaces.

  ‘So why is the architecture here so different to the West?’ I asked.

  ‘Usually the shape of the parcel of land determines the architecture, but in the Medina they built houses from the inside, for symmetry, and what happened outside the building didn’t matter at all. In the Western model, the inside is full and it is empty all around.’