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

by Suzanna Clarke

  Around that time, Ayisha had had an encounter with an African-American from the Bronx. Her long-distance relationship with the English fellow had been going on for about a year at this point, and the more I heard about him, the more he sounded like a dropkick. He veered between swearing undying love for her and muttering jealously about all the men she must be meeting in Fez. He had let her down twice after saying he’d come to visit, and claimed to like the fact that she was ‘innocent’, meaning, I presumed, virginal. So what would he do when she wasn’t? Stop liking her? It sounded to me like he used her as fantasy material, and had no intention of making the relationship real.

  After he failed to show the second time, Ayisha was open to other opportunities, and one came along in the form of the American. He was tall, muscular and good-looking, she told me, and he was also Muslim, a big tick in her book.

  ‘We went out to a club in the Ville Nouvelle and I wore something down to here,’ Ayisha said, indicating a spot about six inches below her collarbone and giggling at her daring. ‘Everyone was staring at me, thinking, Who is she with? He looks so amazing all the girls want to be with him. I felt so free. It was wonderful.’

  Then she found out that her new boyfriend was married to an Italian woman who’d just had a baby. He’d spun her a line about how his relationship with his wife was now platonic and he was planning to leave her, but it was difficult because they had a business together. Sure. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that straight after childbirth his wife didn’t fancy bonking him?

  Ayisha had never been come on to by a married man before, and didn’t recognise the game being played. She asked if I thought he would really leave his wife for her. In a word, no, I said. And even if he did, was that the sort of man she wanted to be with? She mulled this over, but I could see the hormones were still flooding her system and she wasn’t convinced.

  In the middle of August, Sandy left for France by way of Marrakesh. He’d been invited as guest speaker to a literary event at a chateau in the Dordogne, something which sounded unimaginably glamorous and luxurious after the dust and chaos of the riad. We’d initially planned to go together, but as the house required a great deal more supervision than we’d anticipated, we didn’t feel confident leaving it for more than a week. Instead I planned to join him in Ireland in two weeks’ time, to stay with his daughter and her family.

  Renovation is supposed to be one of the most stressful things you can do to a relationship, just down the scale from having a baby and moving house. After two and a half months living and breathing the project – literally – Sandy and I were doing remarkably well. There were the odd moments when our patience with one another was strained, usually when we had differing opinions about the way to do something. I am annoyingly perfectionist and will make people fix things even if they’re only a fraction out. That was why David and I got on so well, but as Sandy pointed out, it was also the reason David’s house was still not finished after five years. Sandy and I simply didn’t have that sort of time, and his attitude is much more, ‘Let’s just get on with it.’ It’s a good balance, each of us tempering the other’s weaknesses.

  Sandy, being an excellent people manager, would constantly check what our workers were doing. I’m more inclined to tell people what I need and let them get on with it, then be disappointed when they haven’t done what I wanted and make them redo it. In truth, our employees were probably happiest with my methods, because that way they could see themselves being permanently employed.

  The day after Sandy’s departure, the smell of something dead pervaded the courtyard. The sweeper spent hours moving things, searching for the source. I thought it might have been the rat I’d spotted the previous week. With unerring instinct it had run into the stove, six of the workers and the cat in hot pursuit. The stove was turned over and every part of it investigated, with no success. I knew that small scurrying visitors would be an ongoing problem until we fixed our drains. Living in a mediaeval city might have its romantic aspects, but Rattus rattus as a house guest isn’t one of them.

  Now the smell seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Perhaps the rat had got into the drain and drowned in the flood of sewage, I suggested, but the others thought it would take more than that to kill a rat.

  I was sitting having a quiet cup of tea after everyone had left for the day when I happened to glance up into the orange tree. There it was. A black plastic bag rotting in the heat, containing the remains of the fish I’d gutted the day before and forgotten to put out with the rubbish that morning. What was the advantage of having a daily garbage collection if I forgot to use it? I put the bag inside another one and into the freezer until the next day, and didn’t tell a soul.

  Creating the halka in the kitchen ceiling was far more complex than doing a regular ceiling, and David had warned us there were only about four carpenters in Fez capable of doing the job. Three of them so far had given us a quote.

  The lowest was from a man called Abdul Rahim, who had a brilliant reputation and had worked on the restoration of the Nejarine Museum and the Karaouiyine Mosque. But he was also a bit of a prima donna, and on the day he agreed to begin work there was no sign of him. His phone was switched off and he was uncontactable.

  I waited a few days then grew worried. We needed to move on the halka as it was holding everything else up. The last name on the list was a master craftsmen called Ahmed, so I paid him a visit. He turned out to be the fellow who’d given the original quote for our carpentry work and then fallen out with Hamza.

  Ahmed showed Si Mohamed and me around the riad he was working on, a mansion of a place owned by a French couple. His work was excellent. He was busy, he said, but could get a good craftsman to do the halka and supervise the job. We arranged for him to come over at four-thirty and I left feeling relieved.

  A little after four, I was astonished to see Abdul Rahim stroll into our courtyard. I had just been mouthing off about his unreliability to Mustapha, and now here he was in front of me, with Ahmed due to arrive any minute. Mustapha stood grinning broadly, hugely entertained by my predicament.

  As David said later, promiscuity gets you into trouble. I felt like I was in a French farce. I had no idea how to get rid of Abdul Rahim, and of course Ahmed arrived early, strolling into the courtyard and stopping in bemusement when he caught sight of Abdul Rahim.

  They exchanged a few polite words, but Abdul Rahim must have told Ahmed in no uncertain terms to nick off, the job belonged to him, because next thing I knew, Ahmed was scuttling away. Frustratingly, Abdul Rahim still refused to be pinned down and I had the feeling he was toying with us.

  Our young carpenter Noureddine, who was doing the smaller work on windows and doors, got a kick out of seeing Ahmed being sent away with his tail between his legs. He told me that, after bringing Ahmed in on another job, Ahmed had convinced the house owners he could do the work alone, ousting Noureddine. Such were the daily dramas of carpenters in Fez.

  My suspicion that Abdul Rahim wasn’t serious about doing the halka was enhanced a few days later when once again he did not turn up as promised. The previous day, we’d finally agreed on a price of eleven thousand dirhams – a far cry from the four thousand he’d initially quoted – and which I then discovered excluded all sorts of things. Si Mohamed made a phone call and was told that Abdul Rahim couldn’t start for another three days. It was now more than three weeks since I’d first approached him, at which time he’d said he could start a week later. He knew he had me in a difficult spot. Even if I did manage to find someone else, they wouldn’t be able to start immediately either.

  In desperation I ran through the other carpenters who had quoted. Why not get one of them to start the other major job, the catwalk? Then if Abdul Rahim didn’t turn up again, I could get him to do the halka as well. I put this to Mustapha, who warned me that one master carpenter would not work on another’s patch.

  Without Sandy to share the management, I felt as though I was on a treadmill of
responsibilities. There were up to eighteen workers at the riad on some days, and I was the Cecil B. de Mille of the show. I came to appreciate anew how much Sandy had been doing. Things were happening in every corner of the house, demanding careful coordination. Every ten minutes or so, someone would come to ask what I wanted done, or whether I was happy with what they planned to do.

  It was impossible to take a break and I developed a severe head cold, even though the temperature was in the high thirties. I craved the luxury of a space of my own that wasn’t constantly invaded by workers. Cooking was a feat. The only tap I now had was some six inches off the ground on the other side of the courtyard. Getting to it meant fighting your way through piles of wood, scaffolding and carpenters’ equipment, and crossing a dodgy bridge over the sewage trench.

  Minor injuries to the workers continued. Fatima, wearing her goggles on top of her head rather than where they were supposed to be, splashed Decapant into one of her eyes. Copious amounts of salty water saved the day. Noureddine presented me with a bloodily bandaged elbow to be dressed. He had come off a motor bike. Mustapha was constantly hitting his thumb with the hammer, and there were frequent stomach ailments.

  These practical problems were straightforward to deal with, but there was one worker who caused me to toss and turn all one night, trying to decide what to do. The man we’d hired as a sweeper was, to put it mildly, a sandwich short of a picnic. The only thing he could do without close supervision was cleaning, but as the wages bill had blown out with all the extra workers, a full-time cleaner was a luxury we could no longer afford, especially one who just hung around for most of the day while getting paid as much as those doing the real work.

  When the sweeper burnt the wood around the top of the balustrade on the catwalk while attempting to clean some old paint off – despite my showing him three times how to protect it – I got someone else to do it and told the sweeper I could only use him four days a week, adding that I’d understand if he looked for other work. The rest of the crew were working the normal Moroccan six-day week.

  The sweeper failed to turn up the following morning and I figured he’d had a better offer. But at ten o’clock I found him sitting in the courtyard, resplendent in his best clothes. He told me he couldn’t possibly work only four days a week because he had a wife to support.

  Hence the reason for my sleepless night. What would he do if I sacked him? How would he survive? But he’d survived before I gave him a job two months ago, and would have to again when the work here finished. I hadn’t offered him a job for life. Why should I be forced to employ someone I didn’t need? I wasn’t running a charity operation.

  This self-justification went round and round in my head, but by morning I felt resolved. When the sweeper turned up next day I told him I couldn’t employ him full-time and he needed to look elsewhere. In a few weeks, when the carpenters had finished and the wages bill was more manageable, things might be different, I said, but in the meantime I would give him a week’s severance pay. He accepted this with grace and I detected more than a hint of relief. Si Mohamed said it was a better deal than the sweeper would have expected, having only worked with us for a few weeks.

  Shortly after this, during an inspection, Rachid Haloui declared it necessary to get a specialist plumber in to check our link to the main drain. I had a vision of a state-of-the-art plumber turning up with a tiny camera on a tube, so we could see the nefarious netherworld. Of course, it was nothing like that.

  The specialist was what was known as a kwadsee, a plumber who dealt with public drains. He resembled a gnome, even more so when he discarded his traditional dress and popped on a woolly cap with a pompom. He had brought a bundle of what looked like long twigs but turned out to be pieces of metal. The only other equipment he had was a pick, a chisel and a trowel. We lent him a spade, and in a very short time he had made a deep hole in the street right outside the front door.

  All the while he worked, the kwadsee kept up a constant stream of chatter. Si Mohamed relayed that we were lucky we got in first that morning because he had also been asked to find a set of gold false teeth, ‘worth a million centimes’, that had somehow become lost in a drain. Just how this had happened stretched the imagination. Had their wearer been bending over the loo while brushing his teeth? Throwing up? Having an argument in the kitchen, and shouting so loud they popped out of his mouth and went down the drain?

  I asked how old the kwadsee had been when he started his job and he held his hand half a metre from the ground. As with chimneysweeps in older times, small bodies were better able to get into tiny crevices.

  ‘In the early days,’ he said, ‘I used to find all sorts of good things, like gold rings and earrings. These days the pickings are lean.’

  He went on to complain about the cost of living in the Medina.

  When he was young everything was so cheap he had done quite well. Nowadays he could barely scrape a living together. I guessed the hundred and fifty dirhams I was being charged for a couple of hours’ work was way above what his regular clients paid.

  While digging, the kwadsee discarded his shoes and I could see him feeling around with his toes to find where the water pipe was. I went back to my writing, and when I popped my head out the door a while later, the hole in the alley had grown huge and all that could be seen of the kwadsee was his grey cap bobbing around in the cavity. He looked to be in his natural habitat.

  When he pulled himself out I glimpsed an ancient wall in the darkness below. This was the original city drain, centuries old. Our connection to it was a trench, created by bricking up three sides and fitting a cover above, which had now collapsed in places. The kwadsee spent most of the day feeding through a sizeable plastic pipe, joining it up at either end. In some ways it was sad – the end of a system that had served the house for three hundred years – but although it was less romantic, plastic was far more practical. Hopefully it would do the job until the riad underwent its next major restoration in another century or two.

  Sandy might have been gone but I was far from alone when the workers departed each day. I had a host of creatures sharing the riad with me. Every evening the sparrows performed, twittering in the citrus trees. There were hundreds of them. Some would take off just on dusk in a mass, while others would settle down on the catwalk, only to be roused in an indignant flurry when I went along it to bed.

  One night, I went to bed to find the room full of freaked-out sparrows, flying around and crashing into the walls. I had left the light on, and perhaps my bedroom looked more appealing than theirs. They eventually settled down, clinging to the new wires hanging above the bed, which didn’t yet have a light fitting. As I wrote my nightly journal I watched their rear ends with not a little concern. I left the big doors open and they were gone by the time I woke up.

  Tigger was getting very bold and was now climbing halfway up the lemon tree, causing a great deal of anxious chatter among the birds. Fortunately she never got interested in the chameleons, probably due to the glacial speed at which they moved. The chameleons were doing well. They had put on weight and spent their days beneath the ripening oranges, waiting for unwary flies. They were undemanding pets who more than earned their keep.

  Mustapha arrived one morning to find Bodiecia clinging to a work shirt he’d washed and hung out to dry a couple of days before – his wife was away, so he was looking after himself. When he went to put the shirt on he found a kind of oversized brooch attached. Bodiecia was a definite shade of blue, trying to make herself invisible. Mustapha attempted to offload her onto the lemon tree, but instead of gripping the branch she let go and took an unexpected dip in the fountain. She was rescued on a broom handle and emerged hissing in alarm.

  As the chameleons’ strength recovered so did their desire to venture further afield. While working on the halka, Mustapha called me in and pointed to a green speck on the top of the massreiya wall. I peered closely and realised it was Genghis, circumambulating the room where the decorated plaster ende
d and the wood began. At two storeys high, if he fell it would be the human equivalent of a base jump minus the parachute. I watched fascinated as he determinedly made his way around. Unable to cope with the riot of competing colours, he settled for turning himself green with lots of spots.

  One day, it seemed that Bodiecia must have ventured too far afield. Perhaps she got fed up with the noise, dust and banging and went off to look for a better tree. Unfortunately there wasn’t one within a muezzin’s call of the riad, and we never learned what became of her.

  I had plenty of other humans for company too, in Sandy’s absence. Amanda, our expat friend, was finally having a housewarming, now that Hamza had finished work on her dar. The last time I saw it, the walls had been completely stripped and were being rendered with haarsh. Piles of lime and sand were heaped everywhere, and dust was thick in the air. Now the dar looked delightful. It was a small house on three levels, with five bedrooms and three bathrooms. Of the original features, there remained only the gallery balustrade, some exposed beams, and the zellij in a couple of rooms. Everything else was new, but in keeping with the style of the house. The work had taken the best part of a year and gone way over budget, but the result was wonderful.

  Hamza and Frida were at the housewarming too. I hadn’t seen either of them since the day Hamza left our riad in high dudgeon. Knowing they had financial problems due to not being able to open their guesthouse, I hadn’t wanted to further trouble them by asking for the money we were owed. But now it seemed that things were finally going their way. They had been granted a guesthouse permit.

  ‘So Suzanna,’ Hamza said teasingly, ‘you’ve been fighting with everybody.’