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

by Suzanna Clarke

  I admired the way he was able to turn himself into ‘everybody’. I just shook my head and smiled and congratulated him on his permit. He and Frida were about to leave for Europe, and by the end of the evening we’d all agreed to get together when they returned.

  A couple of months later, I received two thousand dirhams from Hamza. But I didn’t take up his offer to get his carpenter to finish the work – Noureddine was doing a much better job.

  ABDUL RAHIM FINALLY turned up to do the halka, which was a huge relief, but instead of the team I thought I was getting, he had only an apprentice to help out, and needed Mustapha’s men to assist with the heavy beams. This was annoying, as they were supposed to be finishing the downstairs salon.

  I now had two carpenters onsite, both needing new wood – three thousand dirhams’ worth, to be exact. Until now I had bought second-hand wood and had it remilled, or got the decapo ladies to strip it, but the halka required longer lengths and a more consistent quality than recycled wood offered.

  I rustled up the money, which was no mean feat as it was also payday. I even gave Si Mohamed and Abdul Rahim an extra five hundred dirhams in case it turned out to be more. I couldn’t go with them to buy the wood since I had to go to the baladiya to renew our roqsa.

  While I was there, Si Mohamed called to say that Abdul Rahim had chosen some beautiful wood. ‘It will cost seven thousand dirhams,’ he said.

  ‘Wait right there,’ I said, and found a taxi and headed for the wood shop in Bab Guissa.

  As I suspected, Abdul Rahim had picked the very best quality wood – and who could blame him? It was just a pity I didn’t have bottomless pockets. I asked to see the second quality and was shown pieces with splits in them. Were there longer ones that could be cut down? I persisted. Going through the pile, we managed to choose pieces that were still beautiful but had a few knots and lines here and there.

  But at the end of it, the bill had been reduced by only a thousand dirhams. The price of wood seemed to fluctuate from week to week, depending on the supply, and this week, second-quality wood was a little over nine thousand dirhams per cubic metre.

  I then proceeded to drive the woman in the shop crazy by checking her figures with a calculator. I rang other expats to see what they had paid, until the woman was ready to brain me. Eventually I paid. It hurt but I did it.

  Afterwards, I wished I had bought the first-quality wood. In Australian terms, the price difference was negligible, but here it was huge. And there were so many other things to pay for.

  Later that afternoon, I found myself four hundred dirhams short for the wages and had to borrow from Si Mohamed to make up the difference. He didn’t hesitate when I asked him. I loved that about my Moroccan workers and friends – they would do anything to help. Still, the notion of a Moroccan worker lending money to a Western boss must have amused him.

  It seemed to be my day for unexpected expenses. In order to renew the roqsa, a document was needed from our engineer certifying that she took legal responsibility for the safety of the riad’s structure while the halka and catwalk were being built. I went to Zina’s office in the Ville Nouvelle, where she told me her fee for the document was four thousand dirhams. This was a special price, I should understand, because I was her client.

  My mouth opened and I gulped a couple of times. Six hundred dollars for a single piece of paper? Rachid hadn’t charged me an additional centime for his attestation document.

  ‘For a private residence?’ I queried.

  She changed the figure she’d scribbled in front of her to three thousand dirhams. ‘I must pay insurance, you know. It’s my risk, not Rachid Haloui’s.’

  What she means, I thought, is that if the house falls down I can sue her insurance company. To whom she’d have to pay premiums anyway. I nodded, smiling with as much grace as I could muster, chatted on for a few moments about the house, then took my expensive piece of paper and left. Not a bad salary for five minutes’ work.

  Back at the baladiya, I found that, naturally, Zina’s document wasn’t enough, and I had to send her a registered letter informing her that work had started on the riad. As this was my second roqsa and she’d already been working for me for two months, this seemed just a trifle absurd. But I went dutifully to the post office with the letter, then paid a further two hundred and fifty dirhams at the baladiya and was handed a new permit. It had that day’s date on it, rather than starting when the existing permit expired, as I’d requested. This meant I was being shortchanged by three weeks.

  I had a raging argument in French with the head inspector, who claimed that since I’d now paid, it was too late to change it. I pointed out that I’d only been given the date after I’d paid and he tried a different tack, asking when work had started on my kitchen ceiling.

  We then had a conversation neither of us understood properly, and he resorted to saying that if our restoration went a couple of weeks past the roqsa’s expiry date, he’d overlook it.

  I gave in, thanked him and tried to shake hands on our deal. But he wasn’t keen, which made me suspicious about how binding his reassurance was. I went home exhausted. These fights with bureaucracy were endless.

  The bills didn’t end there. Having found a vet who would spay Tigger for six hundred dirhams, I arranged an appointment for a time when Si Mohamed could come with me, being all too familiar with the extraordinary strength of panicked cats. We managed to get Tigger into a cardboard box and set off in a taxi, but I had written down the vet’s address incorrectly and we ended up driving around to three different vets trying to find the one I had an appointment with, while Tigger grew increasingly hysterical. Finally we found it, a small, clean-looking surgery with a friendly vet.

  I left Tigger to her fate, returning that evening to collect her. I was instructed by the vet to cover the cut in her abdomen with antiseptic cream a couple of times a day, then spray it with iodine. He also sold me some antibiotics and worm tablets, as it appeared she was infested. The total package came to eight hundred dirhams.

  The workers shook their heads in amazement on hearing that so much money had been spent on a cat. They couldn’t afford that amount for their children’s medical bills or for their teeth – things that mattered. Which is not to say the men were indifferent to the wellbeing of animals. One day, I glanced through the window into the courtyard and saw one of them put down his hammer and chisel and pick up Tigger. He put her on his shoulder and stroked her, to which she responded with great pleasure. It made me warm to this quiet, big man from the Sahara who worked with such silent intensity on our house.

  By the start of September, the halka was looking fabulous. The kitchen floor had been dug up and the last of the new drains installed. Coming into the kitchen one day, I looked up and caught my breath on seeing the beautiful carved ceiling of the massreiya nine metres above, framed in the halka. Abdul Rahim’s apprentice was doing an excellent job of the decorative facing inside the halka, reflecting the design on the beams above the pillars in the courtyard. It was wonderful to see these traditional skills surviving.

  The only thing needed to complete the halka was the balustrade. I’d decided to have this made from wrought iron framed in wood, similar to that on the catwalk, with design elements taken from the window grilles in the massreiya.

  Abdul Rahim and I had also come to an agreement on a reasonable price for the catwalk, and Noureddine too was hard at work. He had pulled out an ancient door from the massreiya, frame and all, and found it was hand-adzed all the way around. It probably dated from when the house was built.

  Things had reached a stage where it was a delight to wander through the riad after the workers left, savouring what had been done. I started to feel a thrill of anticipation for the time when it would all be finished.

  There were also moments of beauty during the busy work day. Going upstairs one morning, I glanced into the massreiya and saw Si Mohamed and the apprentice beginning to pray. They were standing side by side, poised on the edge of thei
r mats, their eyes closed in a moment of contemplation. There was something lovely about the way they took time out of their day to reflect, give thanks, just be in the moment – to be reminded that there was something beyond themselves and their individual concerns.

  Before this extended time in Fez, I had not understood the extent to which Islam was woven into the thread of everyday life. Calls to prayer rang constantly over the rooftops and the devout among our workers would race down to the mosque, or find a quiet spot in the riad to pray. Mustapha and a couple of others had dark circular marks on their foreheads from a lifetime of pressing down on prayer mats.

  At the heart of Islam are the five tenets that every Muslim is expected to follow: accepting that ‘there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet’; praying five times a day, the exact times of which are determined by the position of the sun; giving alms to those in need; fasting during Ramadan; and making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime.

  As with practitioners of other religions, Muslims follow these tenets to varying degrees. Nearly all our workers, though, seemed remarkably pious. Even the younger ones would talk in great depth about characters in the Koran (many of whom also appear in the Bible and the Torah), as though they were real people whose habits and foibles they knew well. It was a bit like office workers in Western countries chatting about characters in a soap opera around the water cooler.

  One day, when they were laughing over something, I asked for a translation and was told they’d been discussing Joseph of Nazareth – how handsome he was, how women would see him and swoon. Because Joseph was a carpenter, Noureddine announced he wanted to be just like him. This was the same Joseph, the father of Jesus, whom I had thought a dry old stick when I learnt about him at Sunday School. Muslim religious lessons were obviously a whole lot more lively.

  Islam has a great deal in common with the other Abrahamic faiths, Christianity and Judaism, all three coming from shared traditions. The Muslims respect Jesus as a wise and clever prophet; they just don’t believe he was literally the son of god, which to them defies logic. It seems crazy that people have been killing each other over such apparently minor differences for centuries. But as a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl told me, ‘The reason people hate and kill one another is because of cultural and political differences. They use religion as an excuse.’

  The day before leaving to join Sandy in Ireland, I wrote a long list of things to be done on the house and gave it to Jon and Jenny, who were looking after things in our absence. Sandy often teased me for having ‘a touch of the Henrys’ – my father too is a supreme list-maker – but it seems perfectly sensible to me.

  Although I’d been feeling I couldn’t possibly leave Fez for three weeks, now I was looking forward to it. Sandy and I would have a week together before he returned to look after the house and I continued travelling. It would be a relief to get away from the intensity, from being constantly surrounded by so many people, and from the relentless need to stay on top of everything.

  The least expensive flights to Europe left from Marrakesh, and I arrived in mid-September after a nine-hour train journey. Not having seen the city in four years, I was struck by the increased traffic. The usually magnificent Koutoubia Mosque struggled into view through a haze of exhaust fumes, and the road was bordered on either side by massive hotels that seemed to have sprung out of the ground fully-fledged.

  The taxi dropped me near the Djemaa al-Fna, the famous central square where snakecharmers and storytellers vie with food stalls for the local and tourist dirham, and I spent a bewildering few minutes trying to orientate myself. Marrakesh has double Fez’s population and many more tourists, and it seemed like most of them were trying to cram into the square. After a couple of false starts, I found my hotel, left my luggage, and wandered back into the night in search of something to eat.

  Djemaa al-Fna too had undergone a transformation in the intervening years. The bitumen in the vast square had been replaced with paving stones, and the food stalls that were wheeled out every night, once higgledy-piggledy, had been tidied up. They were now in neat rows and all had exactly the same kind of wrought-iron frames with shadecloths. They were numbered and lit up, their menus displayed on boards, and the place had the air of a food court in a shopping mall. Where was the glorious panoply of culinary choice in a charmingly run-down setting that had once existed?

  Strolling about, I noticed that the prices had been hiked up accordingly. Although you could still get a bowl of harira soup for five dirhams, anything with meat or fish was now more than twenty-five dirhams for a tiny saucer. There was also much less variety – it was now mostly soup, salads, kebabs and sheep heads.

  I ended up eating salad and calamari, squeezed in between other tourists, then headed for the souk, which at eight o’clock was still buzzing. But here too things had changed. The stalls had many more mass-produced items – Chinese shoes, T-shirts, plastic geegaws. Those that were still handmade were of a markedly poorer quality.

  Further into the souk, I was dismayed to see a modern, fluoro-lit boutique between the stalls. It seemed only a matter of time before this market would resemble those in any tourist city, with identical shops and the same factory goods. And now too there were motorbike hoons – Moroccan boys in tight T-shirts roaring through the Medina and expecting pedestrians to leap out of their way. Why were they permitted to drive through a pedestrian thoroughfare? I wondered. I didn’t remember them being a problem last time I visited.

  It seems that in catering to tourists, cities shape themselves according to Western cultural values, and in so doing destroy their individuality, the very uniqueness tourists have been seeking in the first place. Mass tourism sanitises a place, making it appear like everywhere else, then moves on in the relentless search for somewhere different, where the same thing happens all over again.

  Marrakesh had become like a giant holiday resort, a place where people came for a touch of the exotic safely packaged in a familiar wrapping. It made me fear for the future of Fez. In a voracious wave, the tourists were coming. Cheap flights from Europe were about to start.

  Yet who was I to deny local people the money and opportunity that modernisation brought? I only hoped that people would learn from what had happened in other places, and would value and preserve their heritage, rather than sacrificing it to the gods of progress-at-any-price.

  Sandy’s time away could not have been a greater contrast to life at our riad. He had been staying in pure luxury in the south of France, and his appearance as guest speaker had gone over exceptionally well. Then it had been on to Ireland to stay with his daughter and her family, where there were taps that worked, clean chairs to sit on, and a functioning kitchen.

  I joined him there, and found being surrounded by people who spoke English bliss. I didn’t have to call for Si Mohamed, or struggle to describe something in a mix of French, Darija and charades.

  When our domestic hiatus was up Sandy flew back to Morocco to take over from Jon and Jenny, and I continued on to Granada in Spain to fulfil a long-held ambition to see the Alhambra Palace, many of whose artisans had ended up in Fez. The construction of the Alhambra, whose name means ‘red castle’, was begun under the Moorish Nasrid dynasty in the fourteenth century. It is the most significant surviving example of Muslim architecture in Europe.

  The city of Granada has a population of some quarter of a million. It is a mixture of glorious Spanish baroque architecture and ghastly, late-twentieth-century blocks of flats. The effect is jarring, like a mouth of perfect teeth spoiled by a few badly fitting ones. Along the backstreets, though, some old buildings are being refurbished rather than knocked down.

  On the top of Sabika Hill in the centre of the city sits the Alhambra, spread over some 142 000 square metres. A mélange of buildings from different periods, it creates an unlikely but harmonious whole that dominates the skyline. Once inside the site, it’s a long walk to the Nasrid palaces, the main attraction. These palaces were built to dis
play the power that Muslim rulers still enjoyed after being forced to retreat to Granada, their last stronghold. The antechamber, the Mexuar, is a gentle introduction to a series of elaborately decorated salons and courtyards, each more magnificent than the last.

  Following the principles of Islamic design, in the centre of each courtyard is either a fountain or a channel of water, creating a unifying element. The intricacy of the plasterwork and zellij decorating the rooms surrounding the courtyards is breathtaking.

  In the private quarters, the Court of the Lions, colonnades of carved plaster enclose a central fountain supported by twelve leonine statues. A large room to one side of the court has a gigantic star-shaped design in the ceiling, the delicacy of which defies belief; it looks like a multitude of miraculously arranged mini-stalactites, carved out of plaster. This was the room where the last Muslim ruler of Granada, Boabdil, is supposed to have invited to dinner a family with which he’d fallen out, then had them killed.

  Most of the palaces were built over a period of thirty years. I pictured the workers living together, sharing meals, having feuds and money problems, speculating on palace intrigues and wars, all the while working on their few centimetres a day. Did they have some sense that what they were doing would extend so far beyond the bounds of their lives? They could hardly have envisaged that five hundred years later, people of diverse cultures, faiths and religions would come from all over the planet to see their work.

  Boabdil surrendered to the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, after which the fate of the Alhambra was shaky for a few centuries. Subsequent generations of Christian rulers put their stamp on it, demolishing sections and rebuilding them in styles they preferred. Ferdinand and Isabella are variously remembered for winning Granada back from the Moors after an exhausting ten-year war, despatching Christopher Columbus to the New World, and starting the Spanish Inquisition.