The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society

by Chris Stewart

  I thought of all the various meals we had eaten in Mourad’s house – delicious tagines and salads and home-baked flat breads. The cooking was a communal activity, shared by all the women of the house and conducted with grace and skill. It all served, somehow, to emphasise the prima-donna-ishness, the frippery and petulance of our more economically advanced societies. Here was a family without a car, a fridge, a telephone, a camera – the only ornament in the house was the obligatory photograph of Hassan II, the (then) king – and yet they took in orphans off the street, and looked after their old people with a naturalness and clear-sighted sense of duty unthinkable among their North European counterparts.

  ‘Chris, my friend,’ said Mourad after we’d polished off some flat bread and baked aubergine and were reclining away the afternoon hours, ‘I am thinking that tomorrow we shall make an ex-ped-dition.’ He emphasised this last word heavily; clearly he liked the sound of it. ‘And what did you have in mind, my friend?’ I answered lazily.

  ‘I have in mind that I shall find a car and that we shall all have a pique-nique at Aït Oum er-Rbia.’ He obviously liked that word, too – as you would, for it is one of the most delicious names I have ever come across in any language. Say it for yourself – ayit-oom-err–rr-bía – and don’t forget to roll those ‘r’s.

  I had decided, perhaps hastily, that as well as stumping up for the expedition to Aït Oum er-Rbia, I was going to cook the lunch. A picnic in Morocco involves something more than squatting in the grass with an egg sandwich and a bottle of beer. There must be a bit of cooking, otherwise it’s not a proper picnic. So in the morning, Aïsha, Abtisa and I went shopping. Aïsha chose the unfortunate chicken, giving it a thorough going-over with practised fingers before agreeing a price, and I watched the process philosophically as our pique-nique was boiled, plucked and gutted before our eyes.

  Then we continued along the street and, accompanied by a great deal of haggling and tutting and spirited disagreement about prices and qualities, we bought the remaining ingredients for the way I figured a chicken tagine ought to be. We bought some ready-shelled almonds – despite Abtisa insisting this was a waste of money, as she could easily shell ours for us – a screwed-up newspaper full of raisins, some dried apricots and figs, an onion or two and a head of garlic, some potatoes, a heap of fresh coriander and a chilli pepper. Finally we added some olives, bread, a jar of honey and also a preserved lemon, and a bottle of olive oil.

  I was surprised to find, given the rock-bottom wages that are paid in Azrou and the fierce haggling of Aïsha, that none of the items came cheap. But then our ideas about food prices are so distorted by supermarket competition, agri-business and global subsidies that we forget what it must be like for small producers and farmers trying to sell their own crops.

  About midday, with the sun as high in the sky as it was going to get, we all bundled ourselves into the car that Mourad had arranged. We started by discussing the price. The driver, noting my presence among the merrymakers, quoted a price that would have actually bought his car in Europe. ‘I think this is good price, Chris,’ said Mourad.

  ‘No, it’s not good price, Mourad. It is an outrageous price. I’m not trying to buy his car!’

  ‘Outrageous price,’ repeated Mourad, and haggled weakly with the driver. ‘Chris, he has said that he will reduce this outrageous price a little because I have said to him you are my friend. He will take us for nine-tenths of what he originally asked.’

  ‘C’mon, Mourad! You must be joking.’

  By now everyone was itching to get on with the expedition, and the children – Abtisa, Little Mourad and another very small girl I couldn’t put a name to – were literally hopping up and down with excitement. There were ten of us. The taxi was the usual enormous Mercedes, but even so it was asking a lot to get ten passengers in. The venal beast of a driver saw me reckoning this out and said something to Mourad. ‘He says we are also very many people and he will have to pay the police – if not, he will be imprisoned.’

  ‘Tell him I’ll give him half,’ I told Mourad, anxious now to get things moving.

  The driver scowled, said something that was probably best left untranslated, and climbed into the driver’s seat. ‘He accepts your offer. Now let us go.’ At half the original price I was still paying the man over £100, so I didn’t feel that I was cheating him out of his living.

  Somehow we managed to get all those people in the car – a truly extraordinary feat, because, although the children were small and elastic and the boys were thin, some of the women were pretty voluminous. At last the expedition got under way, the taxi racing through the town, hand on horn. I hoped the door mechanisms were in good order or we might all burst from the car at speed.

  The bodies were so tightly packed, it was difficult to see anything out of the windows. After about half an hour, things also got a lot bumpier, as we left the asphalt and joined a sinuous piste that wound upwards through the cedar forest. The car bounced and lurched and skidded round the bends, and the cabin filled with hot dust. It was hell, but from the squeals and yells of pleasure it seemed everyone was having a good time.

  We drove on through the forest for the best part of an hour and then stopped by a lake. As soon as we stopped, everyone exploded from the car to stretch their limbs and discover which ones were still working. Mourad and Mohammed, his younger brother, stripped to their underpants and dived into the lake. I followed and then in went Little Mohammed too.

  Aziz stood on the bank clicking his fingers. ‘Non, mon cher ami,’ he announced. ‘I shall not bathe; I fear that the water is not clean and also dangerous.’

  It was glorious. Swimming in a clear lake among the cedars on a hot Moroccan summer day. The boys howled about and splashed and yelled and swam way out into the middle, while the poor perspiring women shouted encouragement from the shade on the bank. Little Abtisa rolled her skirt up and paddled up to her knees, but that was as immodest as any of the females got. Oh, the cooling of that wonderful water! We were dry within minutes of climbing out and, stuffing ourselves back into the car, we set off on the final leg, over the hill to Aït Oum er-Rbia.

  After a while we started dropping down a steep hill through open farming country and crossed a bridge over a raging river. Then a couple of kilometres upriver we stopped and burst once more from the car. Spirits were high at the thought of the coming feast, and we strode gaily up the hill for our first glimpse of this supposedly magical pique-nique spot.

  Aït Oum er-Rbia was a truly extraordinary sight. There was a tall cliff of golden rock, a spectacular geological fault, and bursting forth from the foot of this cliff was not just a spring but a full-blown river. The clear, icy water leapt from a dozen caves and coursed swiftly down a steep slope, where it formed a fast river dotted with islands. Stairways had been cut into the cliffs, and little bridges of wood and stone constructed between the islands.

  On each island and in shady clefts cut into the banks, teahouses had been built, using the materials that lay to hand: eucalyptus branches, string and wire, sacks and twigs for the roof. The floors were of beaten earth spread with rugs. Everywhere were families sitting in the shady teahouses, some idly trailing an arm in the racing water, others making tea on charcoal burners or preparing the pique-nique. The air inside was blessedly cool. Sweet smells rose from the cooking fires along with thin plumes of blue smoke. And, in spite of the tumult of the waters, there was the most glorious sense of peace.

  Perhaps this derived from the beauty of the spot, or from the natural unsophisticated ease with which these families were enjoying themselves – just the simple pleasure of being together in a place of dazzling and strange beauty. In part it came from the absence of anything packaged. Even the normally ubiquitous Coca-Cola sign was nowhere in evidence; there were no plastic chairs, tables or umbrellas emblazoned with global logos. This was a piece of our lovely planet just as it ought to be seen and enjoyed: no turnstiles, no advertising, no muzak, no health and safety railings to stop you f
alling in.

  We negotiated a fee with the ragged old man who owned our particular tent-pavilion. A little too much, but I was past caring: I was ecstatic about this idyllic place where I was to cook a tagine for these gentle, generous people. The fee gave us the use of an island pavilion with a charcoal stove for the rest of the day. Like figures in a Chinese painting, we tripped across the bridges to reach our island. Aïsha and Latifa, concerned at first at the thought of me doing the cooking, began to relax when they saw how much I enjoyed preparing the tagine. I oiled the dish, added all the ingredients – as many of them as possible stuffed into the cavity of the accommodating fowl – put the conical lid on, and placed it on the cooker on the floor. Then I lay back to wait the hour and a half or so before it was ready. Aïsha had brought the camping gas stove and all the wherewithal for making tea, so soon we were contentedly sipping the sweet minty brew.

  We dozed and murmured contentedly, trailed fingers in the river, swatted flies and daydreamed – all those things you do on a hot summer afternoon in those bright haunted hours suspended somewhere between waking and sleep. And little by little the smell of chicken cooking with coriander and onions and garlic, gently gurgling in the oil over the charcoal embers, became more intense, until finally we could resist no longer and we fell upon it, all of us burning our fingers as we tore at the hot sweet flesh. Then we dozed some more, had another brew of tea and went to explore the cliffs and waterfalls.

  It was not until evening fell, and the air filled with bats and their peeping, that we packed up our stuff and piled again into that long-suffering car for the two-hour ride back to Azrou.

  Early the next morning we went up to the roof to have a look at how the seeds were coming on. If you listened carefully, you could hear a sporadic popping of pods, which gradually increased with the heat of the day until it reached a frenzy at midday. The frenzy continued all afternoon, a frantic leaping and twisting of pods as they hurled the little black and brown seeds high in the air, often over the parapet or down the stairwell. The house was full of seeds and there was a fair smattering on the street outside.

  But there were countless seeds still in the pods, and it was time to move on to the next stage, of treading. Mourad and I spread the pile out all over the roof and set to work marching about, dancing and stamping, to crack open the recalcitrant pods. The most effective move was the Twist – the Chubby Checker dance – which involved raising yourself up on the balls of your booted feet and, from the hips, giving a twisting motion, while graunching the pods on the concrete. It was exhausting but satisfying, in that you could see, amongst the fine fluff and dust, even more seeds.

  For hours in the hot morning sun we danced upon these seeds to our own cover versions of Twist classics, then we swept the whole lot into a pile and set to sieving. With a coarse sieve we separated the dust and the seeds from the whole and broken pods. But there was so much dust that there was no sign of the seeds, so we took the fine-flour sieve from the house and tried again. Imagine the pleasure as the dusty heap slowly turned to a mass of hard little black seeds. I looked at Mourad with his shiny black hair and moustache – all entirely grey – as the dust stuck to the sweat on our arms, hair and faces. We were both wearing handkerchiefs tied over our noses and mouths to stop us breathing the stuff in.

  We repeated the process all through that long hot day, reducing the pods to ever-tinier particles, increasing the dust, and seeing the pile of seeds grow and grow. Later in the afternoon Aïsha and the women came up with wide, flattish baskets of woven rushes. These they filled with seeds and the dust and particles we had been unable to sieve out and, by shaking them in a certain way that only they knew how – I tried it but achieved nothing – they produced a pile of perfectly clean seeds. This was the method they used to clean grain. I was feeling elated, excited by what was looking like a great success.

  There was no such thing as a pair of scales in the house, so we took the bag of seeds round the corner to a grocery stall. Eleven and a half kilos! We’d done it! Mourad and I treated ourselves to an evening at the local hammam, where we lay enveloped in steam, soaking and scrubbing away the strains of the day and several layers of encrusted grime.

  Emerging into the warm night air, I felt an altogether new and different person. The dusty, careworn me, laden down with worries about cobras and forests and fair pay, had been sloughed off and a freer version had taken its place. Relishing the feel of the breeze on my new, pink face, I walked with Mourad to the Café Central where Ali, Aziz and the usual entourage were waiting for us. Normally after such a long absence from each other we would clasp hands and wrap an arm around each other’s shoulders, but that was not enough for the depth of feeling welling up that evening. I was clamped to each in turn in a firm and affectionate embrace.

  We were celebrating a job well done and the start of a business partnership, but of course this was also a parting. Very soon I would be heading for Tangier with our consignment of seeds. There I could do what the scruffiest, most inept tourist could do with ease: I could walk onto a boat bound for Spain and enter Europe. My new friends, however, could do no such thing, though they often talked of it. The enormity of this injustice struck me afresh. Surely there must be some way I could help?

  ‘We could try the Spanish consulate at Tangier, perhaps,’ said Mourad. ‘Chris seems a lucky person. If he accompanies us then maybe we shall succeed in getting our visas. It will be good for all of us to earn some money over there.’ Ali shook his head. He’d tried for a visa several times, as indeed had various other men grouped around the table. The odds were stacked heavily against us. Still, it was worth giving it a try.

  The trick it seemed was to get to the consulate early. So we took the bus to Tangier, stayed the night in a cheap hotel in the Medina, and got up as the first glimmer of dawn was spreading across the skyline. I checked my watch as we rounded the corner to the consulate building. It was 5.30 am – and thirty people were already settled into a line ahead of us.

  A notice on the wall announced that the visa section would open at 9.30 am and close at noon. By the time nine o’clock came the queue stretched round the corner and down the road – maybe three hundred people or more. All of them were clutching various documents that they hoped might give them an edge; letters of recommendation, longexpired visas belonging to other members of their families, photocopied bank statements, and the exorbitantly priced passports that the Moroccan government allows people to buy but which gain them entry only to two countries, Mauritania and Algeria. What you need to travel on a wider scale is a visa – a simple piece of paper that is denied to almost all who apply.

  The window from which this precious document was to be issued was mounted low in the wall so that applicants were forced to adopt a humiliating half-crouching position to talk to the official on the other side. As 9.00 am moved towards 9.30, most of those waiting slipped off in relays for coffee, so the queue was constantly waxing and waning. Then 9.30 came and went and a murmur of impatience rippled through the crowd. At 9.45, the hatch opened and the business of the day commenced. It took a long time to deal with each applicant, often accompanied by shouting and impassioned gesticulation; and, to cut a long story short, by the time twelve o’clock came, and we had been queuing for six hours, there were still thirty people ahead of us. We hadn’t moved forward one single place. Mourad and Aziz kept disappearing to count the numbers, but it was clear that there wasn´t any possibility of being seen.

  There were a number of policemen keeping order of a sort, and finally Mourad had a word with one of them. ‘Of course you’re still in the same place,’ he said, looking at Mourad as if he were some sort of half-wit. ‘You have to pay if you want to be attended to.’

  So the three of us left the line and shouldered our way into the tumultous gaggle that now surrounded the nearest hatch. It was soon obvious who the policeman taking the money was. Mourad spoke to him directly and I slipped him the suggested amount: two hundred dirhams – £16. Immediat
ely we were ushered through the crowd; not to the service window, but to a small door beside it where I alone was told to enter and take a seat.

  The man at the desk cut short his half-hearted attendance to the poor man crouching on the other side of the hatch and turned towards me. ‘Yes?’ he demanded gruffly in Spanish. ‘What do you want?’ I could tell that two hundred dirhams wasn’t going to buy us much time so I hurriedly explained that I was standing as a sponsor for my two friends who wished to visit me at my home in Spain. Of course the thing was as transparent as can be; nobody could doubt that as soon as Mourad and Aziz entered Spain then they´d be off and into the vastness of Europe, where they would most likely stay.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Your friends must return to their home town and there procure the following documents.’ And he proceeded to enumerate a whole heap of improbable papers. A Certificate of Absence of Criminality from the police, a Leave of Absence signed by their employer, a Social Security bond – the list went on and on, covering documents that possibly did not exist and, if they did, were entirely beyond my friends’ grasp. For a start, neither Mourad nor Aziz had an employer to sign them off. ‘There will be no problem,’ the official assured me. ‘Once your friends have assembled all these documents, they just bring them to me and I will authorise their visas. Okay?’

  That ‘Okay’ had a finality to it: we had wasted our two hundred dirhams. Mourad and Aziz immediately recognised the brush-off and were crestfallen, but there seemed no use hanging around and insisting. We walked slowly along the edge of the port, talking of possible stratagems. I remembered once, while queuing on the quayside for a boat to Algeciras, noticing a dishevelled looking youth covered in axle grease and engine oil dodging between the cars on the quayside. As I watched, and beneath the very noses of the Port Police, he crawled underneath a truck and started exploring for handholds and footholds. The police ignored him until the truck was due to move onto the ship; then they ordered him out. He came out and they gave him a half-hearted cuffing. He lurched about, slack-jawed, like a drunk, intoxicated by his desperation and by the constant dashing of his hopes – and then crept beneath the next truck. I hoped that Mourad and Aziz would never be driven to such extremes, though it was easy to see how obsessive the need to travel can become when it is so flatly and unjustly denied.