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

by Suzanna Clarke

  I thought of suburban houses in the West with their vast expanses of lawn, essentially empty space, with the house as the central feature. My architect father had told me that when you design a house you should read the lie of the land, the way it slopes and the aspects of the sun, and then design the house to suit. It was a principle that wasn’t always followed, and certainly not in the sprawling estates of poorly designed housing that were the bane of Western cities.

  But why had this diametrically opposite approach developed in Arab countries?

  ‘The Arabs were desert people and they found the emptiness frightening,’ Rachid told me. ‘So they created a way to formally control the space. The French philosopher Pascal said that when he saw the night sky and the stars it made him anxious, so he believed in God. Man needs something to measure by. In Fassi houses, symmetry is used as a way of making the space intelligible, based around the square or rectangle. Zellij is like a metaphysical science, used to make space measurable.’

  I looked at the countless tiny tiles ranged across the courtyard in front of us, dividing the space into neat squares, five centimetres by five. Now they all made sense.

  Things continued to go our way. Jenny rang one morning to say she was on her way over with our new plumber. She warned me not to shake his hand and I gathered he was a fundamentalist. At least his scruples didn’t extend to not working for infidels. When they arrived he poked and prodded walls and had a go at dismantling the fountain, blowing through the nozzle to see if the channel was clear. We began to feel hopeful he might actually be able to fix it.

  After the plumber had left, Jenny and I went to purchase building supplies, trailing some distance behind Si Mohamed. He was a neatly dressed, mosque-going fellow in his early twenties, tall and lanky with a ready smile and a helpful sincerity. His father had died when Si Mohamed was young and he was now the sole breadwinner for his mother and two sisters. Staying well behind him in the Medina was imperative because the previous year he had been arrested for trying to sell stuffed toy camels to foreigners and spent two months in prison.

  Over the past couple of years, thousands of false guides had been imprisoned for months at a time. They were mostly young men who pursued tourists and wouldn’t take no for an answer, and they could ruin a pleasant stroll through the Medina. Frazzled tourists often paid a few dirhams to get rid of them, which only exacerbated the problem. Although imprisonment was an extreme solution, it had the desired effect, and now there were fewer prepared to risk it. The downside was that any Moroccan seen walking with a foreigner could be arrested, which made life difficult if you had Moroccan friends or employees.

  The building-supply merchants were in Bab Guissa, a very old area of the Medina I had never visited before. Its narrow streets teemed with people. We went past a number of hole-in-the-wall shops until we came to a place the size of a garage, filled with bags of sand, lime, cement, and a pair of old-fashioned scales. To open an account there, I just needed to write down my address. No ID was required, no proof of address or passport. About ten or so donkeys were standing patiently by, ready to make deliveries. They would bring our initial order of lime and sand the following day.

  We went on to a wood supplier, where long lengths of cedar reached up to a soaring ceiling, making the air smell like a forest. I bought four large sheets of masonite to protect the tiles in the courtyard. These were neatly rolled up and a small, wiry porter of about sixty lifted them deftly onto his head. Porters are often employed to carry awkwardly shaped objects, or those not considered large enough for a donkey.

  Jenny and I had to run to keep up with him as he raced off downhill and through the tiny streets, cutting through the crowds like an escaped bull. We lost sight of him after a few twists and turns, but he was waiting at the riad’s front door when we arrived ten minutes later. These porters prided themselves on knowing every one of the Medina’s thousands of alleys.

  At last everything was in place and we were ready to begin. Saturday, May 27 was a red-letter day – the first day of construction. Early that morning, I went to fetch some bread and found three men sitting on a step in our neighbourhood square.

  ‘Salaam Aleikum,’ I said, wondering what they were waiting for.

  ‘Aleikum Salaam,’ came the chorused reply.

  They were still there when I returned, and moments after I got home there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find the same three men there – our builder and his two labourers. I hadn’t recognised Mustapha in his work clothes.

  The three of them proceeded to empty the kitchen. Within minutes our stove, crockery and utensils were sitting in the courtyard. Then they began to rip the plaster off the walls. The speed of their work, along with the noise and the clouds of dust, had us dumbstruck. After so many weeks of frustrating delay, it all seemed to be happening at once, and Sandy and I didn’t know what had hit us. We quietly regretted not having had our coffee half an hour earlier.

  By lunchtime, most of the plaster was off the walls, and the skeleton of the kitchen had begun to reveal itself. It was more than just intriguing ancient brickwork – there were outlines of several windows that had been filled in a long time ago, including one through to the neighbour’s house.

  An insistent braying from the alleyway announced the arrival of a team of donkeys, making their first delivery of lime and sand. As one donkey was being unloaded it decided to make a break for it, clattering down the steps of the alley, panniers flapping. I would have felt like doing much the same thing under the circumstances. It was brought back and given a reprimand with a stick by its exasperated driver, who no doubt had a schedule to adhere to.

  After lunch, Mustapha and his team lined a corner of the courtyard with masonite and then covered it with plastic. Onto this they shovelled huge quantities of lime and sand, piling it into the shape of a volcano. Then they ran a hose from the bathroom and started filling up the cone. This was the beginning of the traditional lime-and-sand mortar undercoat known as haarsh, which is used on interior walls.

  Fassi building methods evolved to suit the natural conditions, but they take time, something many people do not want to spend these days. Haarsh used to be allowed to cure for three months or so. You made your haarsh and then went off on your Hajj – pilgrimage to Mecca – on your camel. By the time you returned, the mix was cured. Nowadays builders, even traditional ones, only cure it for a few days, before adding a small quantity of cement to get it to set.

  But cement does not allow the walls to breathe in the same way that traditional plaster does. Moreover as cement contains lime, you risk creating an excessively lime-rich mixture, resulting in walls that will crumble in a few years – a bit like the ‘concrete cancer’ problems in many Western buildings more than twenty years old. What is the amount of cement that can be added before this happens? No one knows.

  Sandy and I quickly recovered from our initial shock and were thrilled that things were happening at last. It would be months before the house returned to anything like its former glory, with a few modern adaptations like a decent kitchen, but we were on our way.

  By the second day, the kitchen looked like a different room. And amazingly, the two major structural problems that we had thought would take so much time and money had evaporated. The bowed wall and the collapsing ceiling were in fact illusions. A false wall had been constructed out of cardboard to hide the top half of a storage mezzanine. And when Mustapha and his men took the plaster off the ceiling, magnificent cedar beams were revealed, completely intact. They formed a central square, the shape of a halka – a traditional open hole through to the room above, which at some stage had been covered in.

  There was about a foot of rubble on the kitchen floor, but the room now felt twice as big. Behind the cardboard wall, we discovered not just more space but a collection of treasure and trash. We were thrilled to find a tall earthenware urn, intact and complete with sticky brown remnants of the olive oil it once stored. It looked like a Greek amphora without the ha
ndles. Then we pulled out the remains of an old crystal-set radio, a fishing rod, a rusted metal bucket with a lid, a soccer ball, an old picture of the King, and a woven basket from southern Morocco, used for collecting dates. There were also piles of rotten wood, which we planned on donating to the local bakery’s kilns.

  As the demolition progressed over the next few days, it became clear that we were employing too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Apart from Sandy and me, in the way of overseers there were Jon, Jenny, Rachid, Zina and Si Mohamed. Only three people were actually doing the physical labour, but now that the management structure was set up it was difficult to change. On the plus side, Mustapha, whose real work would begin when the reconstruction started, spent time teaching Sandy Darija. In the meantime his two workers, Abdul Ramin and Mernissi, were the ones doing the banging, digging, hefting and carrying.

  Mustapha had asked me to buy gunpowder tea, the sort that is mixed with fresh mint to create the tea Moroccans drink in copious quantities. I did this, and he seemed to have the idea that I should make it. I resisted, not wanting to get trapped in the role of tea lady to the workers. As Si Mohamed was sitting around watching the work, I palmed the job off on him.

  ‘Moroccan whiskey,’ said Mustapha, sipping the over-sweet brew. He claimed that with this tea they didn’t need to eat. They worked through lunch and left an hour early, at four o’clock.

  Sandy had just finished washing down the steps to the front entrance, in an attempt to stop sand and lime coming inside, when another donkey train arrived with yet more sand. As the workers had left for the day, we got the drivers to deposit it outside the door. Several young boys in the alley were taking a great interest in proceedings, so Sandy asked them if they wanted to clean the street of the spilt sand for a few dirhams. They were keen, and he gave them a hose. Big mistake. They had a lot of fun, generating a great deal of muddy water, which ran down the hill and under the front door of a house further down the alley.

  I had often seen its owner, a tiny woman, standing on her doorstep and staring along the street with vacant eyes, as though waiting for someone or something that never arrived. She ignored me whenever I greeted her, but now she popped out of her door like a jack-in-the-box, yelling and screaming at the kids, who all scarpered, leaving Sandy standing there helpless. He did not have the words to apologise to her or say he would fix the problem.

  Hearing the commotion, another neighbour put his head out, and after assessing the situation, came and rescued Sandy by taking a broom and marching down to her doorstep. Sandy fetched another broom and joined him. They cleaned her steps and front entrance, the woman muttering at them all the while. When they’d finished and she’d closed her door, the neighbour pointed to his head and tapped, indicating she was crazy.

  ‘Fou!’ he said, just in case Sandy hadn’t understood.

  Sick of living out of a suitcase, I resolved to find a wardrobe to keep our clothes out of the dust. My starting point was the workshop of a local carpenter, an Aladdin’s cave of old doors taken from Fassi houses. Those houses must have been very grand, for the doors were carved cedar, over three and a half metres in height. Their original owners had either decided they needed the money or wanted to modernise. And of course there was also the possibility that some had been stolen.

  The carpenter was a young man who looked like Cat Stevens in his fundamentalist phase, with a black beard, white surcoat and skullcap.

  ‘Who will buy all these doors?’ I asked him.

  ‘God willing, we leave for Marrakesh this night,’ he said, making it sound like he was off on a voyage of many months. I understood immediately: the doors were being sold to wealthy foreigners. I suspected that many of them would end up in New York or Paris apartments – more pieces of cultural heritage lost to Fez.

  Among all the gigantic doors, one set stood out. They were tiny. Made of heavy cedar, they were so small they looked like they’d been made for a race of hobbit-sized folk. But more than that, they were a technicolour blast. Layer after layer of paint had been scraped back in a haphazard fashion to reveal patches of orange, blue, yellow and various shades of green. They had the exuberance of an abstract painting, all the more interesting because the art was unintentional – the result of decades of utilitarian renewal.

  Quick to spot my interest, the carpenter was at my shoulder. ‘Those come from the Mellah,’ he said.

  Sandy and I had walked through the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter in New Fez, a few days earlier. Once a thriving community had lived there, but now only a couple of hundred Jewish people remained in Fez, and most had relocated to the Ville Nouvelle. Some houses in the Mellah still looked lived in and cared for, but many were in a sad state of disrepair.

  One house in particular had caught our eye. It was of graceful proportions with stylishly carved window frames and balconies. Jewish houses in Fez are unusual in having their balconies on the outside, there being no need for women to be shielded from passers-by. No longer occupied, this house was sliding into an irrevocable decline. Through a shutter hanging drunkenly off a window, we glimpsed a room with beautiful plasterwork, similar to that in our massreiya, now exposed to the elements.

  ‘It’s a pity there’s not some sort of heritage organisation to restore houses like this,’ Sandy mused. ‘If they’ve been empty for, say, fifty years, they could be rented out to pay for the work. Any surplus could go back into the community.’

  It wasn’t a bad idea. ‘But what if the descendants of the owners returned after a few years?’

  ‘It could be held in trust for them,’ Sandy said. ‘If the community has an interest in maintaining the house, then it will be conserved.’

  Jews had begun to settle in Fez from its earliest days, and their fortunes waxed and waned depending on the attitudes of those in power. In the ninth century, a raft of restrictions were imposed on them, including a decree that they could only wear black clothes and sandals, no shoes. They could not ride horses and had to pay higher taxes than everybody else. When Fez was conquered by extremists in 1035, six thousand of their number were massacred.

  But by the thirteenth century, when the Berber Merind dynasty ruled, Jews were protected and their businesses thrived. The Mellah was established in 1438, just outside Fez, ostensibly to shield Jews from the Muslim populace. The site of the Mellah had previously been known as al-Mallah, meaning ‘salty area’, and eventually the word ‘Mellah’ came to refer to Jewish quarters in other Moroccan cities as well. The explanation for the word’s origins has changed over time, and today you might be told that the Jews, in return for their protection, salted the decapitated heads of those who rebelled against the sultan, in preparation for a grisly display on the city’s walls. Although the practice of displaying heads on the walls survived into the twentieth century, I couldn’t find any evidence for the salting story.

  Tolerance levels continued to fluctuate, particularly when the Merind dynasty fell, and then again at the end of the eighteenth century when the entire Jewish community was expelled from Fez and the synagogues destroyed. Two years later they were permitted to come back, but only a quarter returned.

  The French ruling classes of the early twentieth century were hardly sympathetic to the Jews, as the notorious Dreyfus Affair demonstrated, and when the protectorate began in 1912 violence flared in the Mellah. Although Jews were not deported from Morocco during World War II, they suffered humiliation under the Vichy government, and many chose to emigrate when the state of Israel was created.

  Nowadays, Morocco has a reputation for being the most tolerant of all the Islamic countries towards its Jewish population, which is around five thousand nationally, and many Moroccans will tell you proudly that the two groups live in harmony. Morocco is the only country that allows Jews to retain dual citizenship after emigrating to Israel, and many still return each year for religious festivals. Several have held high positions in business and government.

  I was captivated by the doors from the Mellah in the car
pentry workshop. I could see years of history in them, a multitude of stories of daily lives through the generations. But, I reminded myself, I was here to look for a wardrobe. The last thing I needed was a set of doors I had no use for.

  In a corner of the shop, I spotted an old cupboard with carved front panels being used as storage for the carpenter’s tools. On closer inspection, I saw it had been damaged and badly patched in numerous places. It would do. When I asked the price I was told an astronomical amount.

  ‘You will see something like this in the museum,’ the carpenter murmured near my ear.

  Maybe, but at that price I would be paying more for the woodworm and holes than for the actual wood. I bargained him down half-heartedly, then said I was going to fetch my husband. I was unsure about the cupboard but keen to get a photo of the doors.

  When I returned with Sandy in tow he was immediately struck by the doors, in the same way I had been. I took a couple of photos of them and then showed him the cupboard. He was unenthusiastic and turned back to the doors, asking how much they were. The carpenter told him a price that would have paid for the refit of our kitchen. We smiled and shook our heads, saying we couldn’t afford them, and walked out.

  .Sandy was already at the bottom of the hill when I made the mistake of pausing and looking back.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ the carpenter called, sensing a sign of weakness. ‘Is it not a pity that you do not have such doors?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It is.’

  ‘You say how much you will pay.’

  ‘Two thousand, five hundred dirhams,’ I said. I didn’t have to look over my shoulder to know that Sandy had heard this and was shaking his head in disbelief at my audacity, as this was a fraction of the price quoted.