‘It is lunchtime,’ said Mourad brightly, and clapped me on the back. ‘It has been a most successful morning’s work, no? We have established the whereabouts of the hällehäll. Yes – and tomorrow we shall gather the seeds. In the meantime we shall address ourselves to the purchase of some sacks.’
One of the things that struck me about Aïsha’s household was that nothing was kept that was surplus to daily requirements. There was no cupboard or larder for food, nothing that might go off, or that you could nibble at – not even the staples like salt, garlic or cinnamon. Whatever was needed for a meal was brought in fresh every day, and every scrap of it finished off.
I was often treated to chicken at Aïsha’s, as there was a poultry farm attached to the house next door. This urban farm, of which there were dozens in Azrou, was a source of fascination to me. It was a garage building, with the doors open to the street during the hours of trading. On the floor lived hundreds of white chickens on a bed of sweet-smelling cedarwood sawdust. There was no fence or wall to stop them nipping out onto the street, just the watchful eye of the manager as he slumbered at the entrance. When a buyer came along, the boy would be sent among the milling, meeping chickens to find a good fat one. He would grab one and bring it to the buyer, who would expertly feel it all over as it squawked and flapped. If she gave it the thumbs-up, it was dispatched in an instant, plunged for fifteen seconds into a vat of boiling water, whipped out, excess moisture shaken off, and into the plucking machine.
This machine was a masterpiece of intermediate technology. It consisted of a tin box with a chicken-sized hole at one end, and, inside, a set of fast-moving rubber rollers that gribbled the feathers – loosened by the boiling water – off the bird. A deafeningly loud fan blew all the feathers into a sack. The plucked chicken was then plonked on a scale. Skilled fingers went in at the vent, and with one swift pull divested the bird of its guts, which were plopped into an evil-smelling bin. And that was that – not as much as five minutes had elapsed between selection of the chicken and its sale, gutted and plucked. It was a very slick operation.
On our return from the forest that first day, we dived thankfully into the cool shade of Mourad’s house, performed our ablutions at the tap in the courtyard and collapsed onto divans. We had just enough energy to sip a glass of mint tea and pull apart a large pizza made of dough and flakes of shredded mutton fat that Aïsha had brought in on a tray along with some small bowls of tomato and beetroot salad. All was quiet in the hot afternoon – the streets had shut down. A quiet squabbling came from the chicken farm next door, the distant grumble of a lorry. I closed my eyes, wriggled a bit to get comfortable, and fell asleep.
Perhaps I dreamed of the splitting of seedpods in the sun, the scattering of my precious harvest, or maybe of the disagreeable black cobra that comes racing at you through the grass just for the pleasure of killing you. But anyway, when I awoke the light was fading and the streets were in full, noisy babble. Cocks were crowing (people don’t seem to realise that cocks don’t just crow the dawn but keep going all their wakeful hours); tin-makers were banging their pots; circular saws were screaming as they ripped through cedar logs in the carpentry shops; neighbours were exchanging views from window to window across the street. Altogether, it was almost like music, as it blended and squeezed through the high window of our room.
‘Bonjour, Monsieur Christophe,’ said Aziz as he raised himself from beneath his blanket. Mourad stirred and sat up. ‘First we shall drink tea,’ he announced, ‘then we shall go to the town in search of sacks.’ He disappeared from the room and shouted down the stairs for the tea tray.
‘Listen, Mourad,’ I said, over the second glass of tea. ‘I’ve not gone into details about this, but I would like to employ you all properly for a couple of days and pay you a fair wage.’
‘But my dear friend, it will be our great pleasure to help you.’
‘That’s very kind, but we need to fix on a sum in advance.’
Mourad studied me earnestly for a moment and put his hand on my arm. ‘Let us not speak of such things, for we are brothers, no? And now let us go to the town.’
I’ve always thought that the most important piece of equipment to take on your travels is your nose, and its attendant olfactory receptors. The sense of smell is one of the most immediate and tactile we have – and surely to perceive the smell of a thing we must actually ingest microscopic particles of it, whether it’s the heady scent of camellias or that of a long-dead dog in a ditch. A smell revives the memory and transports you to a time and place more powerfully even than music. If I ever need to return to Azrou, all I would have to do is mix together some mint, cedar, diesel and a hint of drains, and take a good long sniff.
Mint tea is the fuel that Morocco runs on. A glass of sweet mint tea is surprisingly satisfying on a day of heat and dust, and no meeting or transaction, no coming in or going out, is complete without it. A pot accompanies each meal, too. It makes a wonderful and effective substitute for alcohol because the ritual that surrounds it is so satisfying. It is brewed with gunpowder tea from China, a huge handful of pungent mint (or in winter a sort of southernwood) and an enormous block of sugar. The sugar comes in tall glittering cones of a kilo and you knock what you want from the cone with a special hammer; generally, you stuff it in to take up the remaining space after the tea and the mint. Then, you pour boiling water into the pot and leave it to infuse. Mind you, that sounds too simple, for it really is a ceremony, and the keener practitioners will make a preliminary brew to warm the pot, throwing it out before the final tea is prepared.
To service this obsession Azrou, like most Moroccan towns, has vast mint gardens on its outskirts, and every morning mountains of fresh mint are barrowed and donkeyed and trucked through the streets to the markets and shops. This provides the town’s base perfume. Next is the cedar. Each street has a dozen little carpentry workshops that process cedar logs from the forest that cloaks the mountains above the town. Here they make benches and divans and tables and chairs and wooden boxes and pots and, whenever a drill or a saw or a plane bites into the wood, it releases a sweet scent that literally fills the air. To have one’s own furniture made from perfumed wood, that would be a pleasure indeed.
As for the darker notes of the perfume of Azrou, well, there are old trucks everywhere – Bennes-Marel, they’re called – and they belch fumes into the hot air and dribble diesel and sump oil into the dust. It’s not as bad as it sounds: it seems somehow appropriate and gives a feeling of animation and industry to the town. Likewise the drains, which are not as foolproof and effective as they might be, but again as a counterpoint to the mint, the cedar and the smell of cooking smoke and spicy chicken and lamb – even the whiff of a drain can be a subtle pleasure.
Mourad, Aziz and I threaded our way through the hot evening streets luxuriating in these smells and keeping a look out for sacks. Every five minutes there were people to be effusively greeted: labass, veher, hamdullillah, each side would intone. And then, suddenly, Mourad recalled that he had a student to attend to, and suggested that he leave me in the capable hands of Aziz to conduct our purchase. I agreed, happily enough, though it transpired that Aziz was not the best person to delegate the task to. Having steered me first into a sweetshop, then a carpet store, a shop selling what passes for lingerie in Azrou, a haberdashery, and the shop of his friend who sold baby clothes, he seemed drained of ideas. I suspected him of putting his social life ahead of our mission, but then he did actually ask for sacks in each place, so who knows?
‘Why don’t we try a hardware or animal feed store,’ I suggested at last. He was astonished at the idea.
‘But those places do not have sacks for sale. I know this,’ he insisted. ‘And tomorrow is Thursday, the day of the souk. At the souk we will buy sacks.’
So we wended our way to the Café Central where we had arranged to rejoin Mourad. It was crowded and Mourad waved to us from a corner table, where he had been sitting marking an essay. As soon as I drew up
a chair, he summoned the waiter and introduced him to me: ‘Hamid, meet my new friend and brother, Chris. Christophe, Hamid is my oldest friend; we were at school together.’
We shook hands earnestly and, with the shaken hand on our hearts, bowed to one another. Hamid was slightly built with rather mournful eyes. He wore a white shirt and a red waistcoat and was quite the fastest-moving waiter I’ve ever seen. We gave him our order and he weaved off amongst the tables taking two or three more as he went. Mourad leaned closer towards me and explained in a whisper: ‘Hamid looks sad because he is sleepy. He commences at six o’clock every morning and does not finish until sometimes later than ten at night.’
‘You’re joking. That’s a sixteen-hour shift!’ I exclaimed.
‘Listen, I am telling you: he does this six days a week and he earns… How much do you think he earns?’
‘I wouldn’t like to guess…’
‘He earns fifty dirhams a week.’
It was hard to believe. Fifty dirhams was the equivalent of about four pounds. ‘But it is true,’ Mourad assured me. ‘If you do not believe me, ask Hamid himself.’
‘This place is making plenty of money; surely they can pay him a reasonable wage.’
‘It is making a fortune – you are right. You see that man by the till, the fat bastard who does not move all day from the money, and whose eyes are moving everywhere. He is the owner. He is the richest man in the town. He is rich because he pays little money to Hamid and to those who work in his bakery.’
‘So why doesn’t Hamid leave and find a better job? He’s an amazing waiter.’
‘There are no better jobs in Azrou – and if Hamid asked for more money, well, there would be ten men asking for his job. He cannot leave Azrou, as he looks after his widowed mother. The two of them live on his fifty dirhams a week. He would like to have a girlfriend, perhaps to have a family, but he cannot. He has neither time nor money to get himself a girlfriend. He is a very sad man, very kind and good, but sad.’
As Mourad spoke, Hamid appeared, placed our orders on the table with a smile and, signalling to some customers who were vying for his attention, whisked off again. Two young boys with shoeshine boxes quickly took his place. They had been looking in dismay at all the trainers and canvas sneakers before honing in on my scuffed leather lace-ups, caked in dust. As one of the boys cleaned my shoes, he kept up a spirited and what sounded like a rather adult conversation with Mourad, who seemed to know just about everybody in the town.
I love having my shoes cleaned and have always found highly polished leather rather beautiful, although the shine would last only ten paces or so out on the street before the dust dulled them again.
I asked who the boy was. Mourad made a helpless gesture. ‘He has no family, no mother or father,’ he said. ‘He lives on the street. Many of these children do. In the winter it is very cold in Azrou, snow lies on the streets, and it is hard to survive. There are many old people who live on the streets, too, and of course it is even harder for them. Many die.’
As I digested this information, I realised that Aziz was studying me closely while clicking his finger joints. ‘We become very skilled at this, the clicking of the fingers,’ he commented wryly. ‘It is because we have nothing else to do. In Azrou it is very hard to be positive about the future.’
‘Now, enough,’ said Mourad, suddenly impatient at this gloomy turn in the conversation. ‘If we cannot be positive about the future, then let us be positive about the present. Here we have Chris, the night is young. Let us find a car and go to Amrhos.’
‘Amrhos?’ echoed Aziz, with a note of surprise.
Mourad blushed. There was something iffy afoot. ‘I’ll get Ali and Hamid and we’ll rent a car. It won’t be too expensive and things will be just warming up in an hour or so.’
What things, I wondered. Then a thought struck me. ‘Mourad,’ I demanded. ‘You are not taking me to a place of ill-repute, are you?’
Both Mourad and Aziz looked shocked. ‘How can you ask this, Chris?’ Mourad lamented. ‘Amrhos is a party of Berber drumming and dancing. It will be an unforgettable experience. You yourself told me you love the drumming. We must all go.’
There was a slight edge to his voice that bothered me still, but two hours later eight of us stuffed ourselves as best we could into an ancient Mercedes taxi and set off for the outskirts of town. It didn’t feel quite like a normal taxi ride, and there was a reluctance to discuss openly the evening ahead. I pondered this as we sped – for some reason without lights – along roads crowded with people and donkeys. After about fifteen minutes of this, we arrived at an unfinished roadside hotel, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. I paid the taxi driver. It seemed to be understood that I was the one bankrolling the operation, and indeed I was probably the only one among us with any cash.
To my relief, there was both drumming and quite a crowd. The drummers had already begun their set and as we entered a brightly lit bar, with a stage along one wall, the room seemed to vibrate to the sound. There were maybe thirty or forty other people there, most of them men, but with a family or two as well. As the waiter came for our order, I asked Mourad what there was to drink. ‘Fanta or Sprite, or tea if you like.’ Then he added quietly, ‘There is also beer, I believe.’
Everybody ordered beer. And that, of course, was what all the cloak-and-dagger stuff was about. It was a drinking expedition. Azrou was officially dry and the Amrhos was the one place in town – or, rather, out of town – where you could drink alcohol. And it was a lot of fun. As our beers arrived, I watched the three young men on stage: one a singer, the other two playing Berber hand-drums. These are big deep tambourines without jingles, which you hold with your thumb through a hole in the rim and attack with your fingers; as you approach the centre, the boom is deep like a marching band’s bass drum, while closer to the edge there is an endless variety of tones.
These drummers knew their stuff, creating a gutsy excitement with their complex rhythms and, as they drummed, three young women in floor-length dresses, belted at the waist with scarves and glittering with jewellery, walked onto the stage. The crowd applauded and the singer, a stocky man with fists the size of small barrels, burst into song. The song seemed to have no melody but employed the guttural sounds of Berber to harmonise with the drummers. It was exciting but also slick and disciplined, with a tight pace. Some of the songs that followed were question and answer, with the dancers wailing and ululating in response, setting their necklaces, bangles and ankle jewellery jingling. Even without amplification, the singer and drummers filled the large room and held the audience entranced.
The dancers swayed at first to the music, but little by little they started to echo the complexities of the rhythms with their feet and arms, and hips. It was the hip movements that got the crowd going – and it was hard not to sit with your eyes glued to those lubricious hips that swivelled and writhed with such speed and grace. The dancer nearest our table seemed to be putting on a special show just for me, fixing me with her deep, dark eyes and gyrating her hips with absolute confidence in her allure. Mourad and my table companions kept nudging me and giving me looks, as if I were supposed to play some part. Which, of course, I was. For every now and then one of the men in the audience would leave his table, walk over to the stage and insert a note into the cleavage of his favourite dancer.
Mourad leaned across to me with a grin: ‘You, too, must give – she is dancing for you and it is how they earn money.’
I’d never done this sort of thing before. I fumbled about in my pocket and pulled out a fifty dirham note. Those eyes continued boring into me as I stumbled across the floor and inexpertly slid the note into the dancer’s dress. It wasn’t so tricky a manoeuvre, but failure would have been deeply humiliating – imagine the note sticking to my sweaty palm or fluttering off into the crowd. The note, anyway, found its home, and it must have been one of the better tips, as for the rest of the performance the dancer remained near our table and kept her eyes fixed on me,
triggering pokes and sniggers from Mourad and his cronies. As for me, it seemed somehow rude to look away, but exhausting to keep up the rapt appreciation of a fan.
Eventually, the last number came to an end and my dancer cast a meaningful look at me over her shoulder as she left the stage.
‘I think she likes you, that dancer,’ said Mourad gaily.
‘Oh don’t be so foolish, Mourad. That’s her job – she dances for money.’
He looked hurt at the thought. ‘Fifty dirhams is a not a large amount of money to give to a dancer. It is generous but no more. At these dances some men go crazy and give them really big money. No, she is interested in you because you are different.’
I hung back a little, but Mourad had me by the hand and was not going to let me get out of this. He moved to the next room, where a disco was starting up, and keeping hold of my hand, steered me towards the dancer. ‘But I can’t speak any Berber…’ I hissed ‘Only 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and…’ – I racked my brains for another word that I knew how to say – ‘…Ah, yes. Donkey.’
‘Leave it to me,’ Mourad hissed back, ‘I’ll translate.’
We reached the dancer, who clamped her eyes back onto my face as if she’d been raking the crowd looking for it. ‘Um.. you danced really beautifully, thank you,’ I said in English, looking between her and Mourad. Mourad then translated this, at great length, into an impassioned outpouring of Berber. The scene reminded me rather of Cyrano de Bergerac, when the big-nosed hero supplies sweet words of courtship to the friendly moron that the heroine has taken a shine to. Perhaps Mourad was reciting stanzas from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, or maybe even a choice passage of Graham Greene. When he finally drew to a close, the dancer smiled at me, slightly condescendingly, as one would to a flirtatious adolescent, said a few words to Mourad and moved away.
The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society Page 11