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

by Suzanna Clarke

  Coincidentally, the next day, our neighbour Yusef had an encounter with a much more serious snake. It was a metre and a half long and had appeared out of a disused well in his courtyard. We learned of this when his mother came to our door asking for a bucket of sand and some cement with which to close the well.

  Later we found out that Yusef, upon seeing the reptile, had run into the alley yelling, ‘Snake! Snake!’ Within five minutes, some twenty people had appeared brandishing sticks and bashed the poor thing to death. It seemed amazing to me that even in the most densely populated of urban centres, wild creatures could still make their homes – until discovered by horrified humans.

  Yusef was an interesting character and he and Sandy had become friends. He ran a stall in the souk that was little bigger than a telephone box, where he sold spices, beans and coffee. He had a BA in English literature, which he’d studied simply because he liked it. He had a particular fondness for the writings of James Joyce, and this was somehow apt: the squalid yet glorious Dublin of Joyce’s imagination has more than a little in common with the Fez Medina.

  Yusef’s knowledge of English literature had not been of great benefit to him. As many a Western graduate will tell you, it’s hard enough for those in English-speaking countries to get a job with such a degree, and in Morocco it was only marginally more useful than a degree in advanced Swahili. After six years, Yusef had given up trying to find a job suited to his qualifications and was resigned to being a shopkeeper. He would have liked to teach English, but the competition to qualify as a teacher was fierce and he couldn’t afford the additional years of study. He lived with his aging mother a couple of doors down from us, having stayed to look after her when his four siblings had married.

  Their dar was small and plain, tiled with worn zellij. It had the simple charm of a house used for living, with little money to spare for decoration. The biggest and most impressive thing in the house was the television, which, we were proudly informed, received two hundred channels. It looked bizarrely anachronistic in the worn old dar.

  Sandy and I had been given the grand tour. Most areas of a Moroccan house are usually off limits to all but immediate family, but Yusef led us up tiny steep stairs and through a succession of small rooms, once used for storing olive oil and winter supplies, to his bedroom on the second floor. It had a window out to the courtyard and a serious crack from floor to ceiling in one wall. There was a bare mattress with a blanket and pillow, a few clothes hanging from pegs, a desk and a set of bookshelves. This was the sum total of his worldly goods.

  On the bookshelves were academic titles like Travel, Gender and Imperialism, along with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kipling’s Kim and Joyce’s Ulysses. Yusef was shy about his own work, but after some prompting showed us a copy of his thesis, titled ‘Perceptions of Orientalism in Western Writing’. The level of language was impressive, of a higher standard than most of the essays I’d marked as a university lecturer.

  From the terrace we could see a house whose roof had collapsed into the grand salon below. It had happened five or six years earlier, Yusef said, but the family still had no money to repair it.

  Over tea, he told us that his distant ancestors had come from an area that is now part of Saudi Arabia. His family had lived in this dar for generations, and both his grandfather and father had worked in the Chouwara tanneries. It was such physically hard work that in winter they would eat four breakfasts, the first at five a.m. and another on the hour thereafter, for respite from the cold. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to spend all of every working day up to your knees in the putrid concoctions used to strip and colour the hides.

  Yusef’s life was easier than theirs. He started work at his tiny stall around eight a.m., coming home at two for a long nap, then returning at five and staying until midnight. He did this six days a week. There wasn’t much room in his life for anything else, including finding a wife.

  When David came to dinner a few nights later he walked into the kitchen and stood staring up at the carved and painted ceiling of the massreiya, high above. With his thumbs and fingers he made the shape of a square, and squinted through it.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you could put a halka back in here.’

  Sandy and I looked at each other. A hole in the middle of the kitchen ceiling so that we could look up and see the beautiful decoration in the massreiya. A type of atrium – not a bad idea. It would be surrounded by a balustrade on the floor above, and would also link the two levels of the house, giving the downstairs a sense of grandeur it currently lacked. Furthermore it would return the house to how it once had been.

  But I wasn’t keen on what we would lose – a lot of floor space in the massreiya, which would essentially become a gallery around the four sides of the balustrade.

  We slept on it, and next morning it still didn’t seem like a completely wacky idea. Not, at any rate, as wacky as David’s previous idea, which was to demolish the catwalk joining the two sections of the house, since it had been put in at a later date. As the stairs to the upper salon no longer existed, this would have given us no way of getting there – a minor detail.

  We called Zina to get her opinion of the Hole of Amster, as we took to calling the halka, and after discussions with David, Mustapha and Rachid, she gave her approval. And so it was decided.

  In the meantime a message was relayed from over the wall: I was wanted next door. I walked around to the entrance in the next alley with Si Mohamed, expecting to be told that more plaster had fallen off the neighbour’s wall, or that their bedroom roof was sagging from the rubble we’d piled on the floor above it. But instead I was presented with a paper bag, inside which was a pair of elaborately sequinned pink slippers – in my size.

  I was amazed and touched. I didn’t know what I had done to deserve such a present. Si Mohamed said afterwards it was because I had taken seriously their concerns about plaster falling off their walls from our banging.

  The building project had now been going for more than two months and we were concerned that, with roughly a third of our available time and half our budget eaten up, we still hadn’t managed to get Mustapha and his men out of the kitchen. They hadn’t yet touched the rest of the house – the catwalk that looked in imminent danger of collapse, the roof that leaked every time it rained. Getting the project finished this year was starting to look doubtful, but we couldn’t leave the house half finished when we went back to our jobs in Australia.

  The more anxious we became, the more it seemed the workers dawdled. If we weren’t actively supervising – if Sandy and I went out together for a couple of hours – hardly anything got done. But what did they need to hurry for? As they saw it, when the project was finished they would be out of a job.

  We both needed a break, but one of us had to stay and supervise. Sandy obligingly offered to let me go first, so with Jon and Jenny I hired a grand taxi for the day and went to the villages of Sefrou and Azrou in the Middle Atlas Mountains, south-west of Fez. Jon and Jenny were looking for carpets and furniture and I went along for the ride, with a view to buying a carpet too if the right one was to be had.

  As we were foreigners, our driver needed to take our passports to a police post before we left town, something that happened on every car journey out of Fez. Then, on the outskirts of the city, we passed two policemen standing vigilantly at the side of the road, checking cars, their occupants and belongings. The heavy police presence on Moroccan roads is one indication of how hard the government is working to avoid further fallout from September 11, and to prevent the infiltration of violence into their normally peaceful society. Many arrests have been made and a number of terrorist plots diverted. In cities and towns all over the country are billboards showing a giant red hand gesturing ‘stop’, with the words ‘Don’t touch my country’ written in French and in Arabic.

  The roots of the violent elements go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the US government was funding and training the Islamic Mujahideen to fi
ght the Russians in Afghanistan. Young Arab men looking for a cause, or just looking for trouble, were drawn from all over the Middle East and North Africa – among them a charismatic and wealthy young man named Osama Bin Laden. The Moroccans in their number subsequently founded the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain), one of the goals of which is to make Morocco an Islamic state. According to The Independent newspaper, the bombers who carried out the 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca that killed twenty-six people, and those responsible for the 2004 attacks on trains in Madrid where 191 died, were under instruction from this group.

  Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sandy and I were watching the Arab television station Al Jazeera with a group of Moroccans in a café. As footage of the assault on the city of Falluja was aired, showing the maiming and killing of children, women and old people, some of the men around us grew furious, shouting at the television, hitting their fists into their palms. Others simply covered their faces. I wondered if people in Australia were seeing what we were – what their government had committed them to.

  Despite the anger of Moroccans at what was being done to their fellow Muslims with the support of the West, we never felt any of it directed personally at us. Connecting with other people, foreigners included, is a very strong element in Moroccan culture. The Moroccans knew that we were as disturbed by what was happening in Iraq as they were, and they responded to us as fellow human beings rather than as a specific nationality.

  Inevitably, though, there are young Moroccan men who continue to answer the Jihadist call. Moroccan authorities say that more than fifty volunteers have gone to Iraq as fighters or suicide bombers, though the real figure may be higher, since not all who make the journey are traced. But the government has cracked down on recruiting networks, including those in Algeria, and continues to make numerous arrests.

  The journey to Sefrou took a couple of hours, the landscape changing from the Sais Plain to olive groves to rocky fields as we began to ascend the foothills. Unlike much of the rest of Morocco, the vegetation in the Middle Atlas is luxuriant. The region is sparsely populated by Berber people, and villages are few and far between. It felt good to be out in fresh air after so much dust and rubble at home.

  As the road began to climb more steeply, we came across orchards, with roadside stalls selling produce. It being midsummer, the cherries had just finished, but there were other rows of dark trees, their branches weighed down with the golden orbs of oranges. The pickers were in among them, men and women in colourful, practical clothing, some with small children on their backs. Donkeys with panniers waited patiently nearby to carry the loads of fruit.

  Sefrou is a charming town, intersected by a rushing river with a picturesque bridge and surrounded by impressive crenellated ramparts. It takes its name from the Berber tribe that originally settled there more than two thousand years ago. That tribe had converted to Judaism, but in his usual persuasive way, Moulay Idriss I ensured they became Islamic in the eighth century. Four centuries later, the town grew wealthy through trade with the Sahara, and a hundred years after that, a large number of Jewish refugees arrived from southern Algeria. Now the majority of Jews have gone to Israel, but the architecture of Sefrou’s Medina still reflects their influence, with external balconies overhanging the alleys.

  Leaving the taxi outside the main gate, we wandered through the curving streets, looking for the old cedar furniture that we’d been told the residents of Sefrou were discarding in favour of wood veneer. The town had a reputation as one of the best places to buy such things, but although we scoured the streets we didn’t find a single item.

  There was every variety of fruit and vegetable, of first-rate quality – shiny purple eggplants, bright yellow zucchini flowers, glowing tomatoes, luscious lemons, just-picked plums, gently ripening avocados. If we’d been making a slap-up banquet for fifty we would have been in heaven. But sadly, nothing you could sit on.

  Just as we were giving up, we spotted a familiar face. It was the waiter from Café Firdous in Fez, who confirmed that, yes, there was a market on today but it wasn’t here. Kindly he offered to show us the way, and we followed him for some distance through the backstreets. Our hopes rose as we came upon a number of parked vans, and beyond them a stream of people heading for a ramshackle clutch of tarpaulins. Surely this must be the market.

  It was. But the entire place was filled with more fruit and vegetables. Crestfallen, we bought a kilo of nectarines and slunk away, all thoughts of French colonial wardrobes, chests of drawers and chairs expurgated from our minds.

  Back in the taxi, we headed south-east to Azrou, by way of Ifrane. Winding our way up the mountain roads, we caught the occasional glimpse of a Barbary ape going about its business among the cedar and holm-oak forests. Then, on the outskirts of Ifrane, a curious cultural displacement occurred. Swiss-style chalets with steeply pitched roofs and shutters started to appear at regular intervals, giving the incongruous impression that we’d somehow been whisked off to the Swiss Alps.

  The streets of Ifrane itself are broad and clean, with chalets so Alpine you almost expect a cuckoo to pop out of the shutters. They are the legacy of French homesickness during the colonial era, when petty officials created a kind of theme park so they could pretend they were back in Europe on weekends.

  In the nearby forest, the last wild Atlas lion in North Africa was gunned down in 1922, a victim of the French predilection for killing for pleasure. The Romans had put a serious dent in their number some two millenniums previously when they exported thousands to kill those pesky Christians (before deciding Christianity wasn’t such a bad idea after all). Nowadays the central park in Ifrane sports a concrete statue of the last lion, beside which tourists pose for photos.

  The road into the nearby town of Azrou is also lined with chalets, and its European architecture echoes the health-resort town it was during French rule. Being in the middle of a Berber area, it has a reputation for carpets at much better prices than those in Fez, which have passed through several middle-men. The proprietor of one small shop took us to see the bulk of his stock, kept in a house close by. Propping ourselves on the window ledge, we settled in for a session.

  Carpet buying is not something to be done in a hurry. There is a certain ritual to be followed. Even if your eye has alighted on the very thing you want, you cannot simply say, ‘I want to see that,’ then make a deal and be done with it. You must wait while the carpet seller shows you what is clearly his newer, inferior stock, and you should say things like, ‘Yes, that’s very nice, but it’s not right for me.’ Eventually he will offer to show you stock that is ‘special, just for you’. These carpets are always old and expensive, and you’re told they don’t make them like this any more. This particularly applies to the very piece you want.

  We spent two hours going through almost all of the stock. Some carpets that looked intriguing when rolled up were disappointing once unfurled. We put things we liked into the mumkin – maybe – pile, and when it came time to choose, Jenny and I both wanted the same one, cream with lovely bands of embroidery in reds and browns. Carpet viewing with people other than your partner is potentially fraught for this very reason, but Jenny and I managed to resolve the matter peacefully, with her ceding me my first choice and buying a vibrant orange carpet she liked almost as much.

  I returned to Fez refreshed, and a few days later I was coming back from the Hole of Moulay Idriss when I ran into David deep in the Medina. He was on his way to inspect a Koranic school that he was paying to have restored, and I went along to have a look. David spent a lot of his own money on such community projects, including street façades, old schools and fountains. The Koranic school was a single room squashed between houses, with a pretty, masharabbia-screened window facing the street. Because of David’s exacting standards, the restoration had been going on for months, but the timeframe wasn’t helped by some of the workers’ methods.

  Left to his own devices, the master craftsma
n responsible for restoring the medluk on the wall did less than a metre a day, and David had made him speed up. The medluk was now cracking in places, something the craftsman blamed on being urged to go too fast, but which David suspected was a result of not allowing enough time for the lime and sand mix to cure. We had decided against using medluk in our riad for this reason; we didn’t have the space to make a huge pile of it while we waited the month or so it needed to cure.

  David and I stopped for a snack at a tiny stall run by a round, jolly young woman and her rake-thin husband. It consisted of a table, a glass cabinet with simple dishes displayed, and a gas burner with a pot. We ate stewed beans, beetroot salad, fried fish and bread, while eyeing a pan full of sizzling oil into which were being dropped crumbed sardines, freshly cut potato chips and other vegetables. When the husband put a couple of whole capsicums into the pan they exploded, spattering fat far and wide, including a couple of drops on my scalp. Needless to say, they hurt, and when the woman covered her eyes I thought she must have had a direct hit too – but no, she took her hand away and I saw that she was laughing.

  After parting company with David, I walked back through the souk. Glancing into the depths of a herbalist’s shop, I saw hanging up at the back various animal skins, including some kind of small spotted wildcat. It was no doubt endangered, I thought, and wondered how you overcame hundreds or thousands of years of superstition merely by telling people that putting bits of animals into magic potions was more likely to result in the vanishing of the species than in any cure.