by Zora O'Neill
I was taking my mother to the hammam because I wanted to share previous great public bathing moments. The first one had come under the steam-filled dome of a fifteenth-century bathhouse in Aleppo, where I was scrubbed furiously by a mountainous woman in nothing but a red nylon string bikini. As she scraped at my armpits, behind my ears, down the bridge of my nose, she chatted and laughed with her similarly unattired colleagues. It was like Moby-Dick, when Ishmael worked the spermaceti with his fellow sailors and was overcome with love for mankind. Except I was the great glob of whale wax, kneaded and prodded, all the lumps worked out.
I also wanted to go to the bath to be quiet. As I had learned in Aleppo, the hammam was a place where language was unnecessary, and I wanted the pleasure of a mute hour in the heat, with no translating responsibilities.
I didn’t go into the Chaouen hammam expecting the soaring dome of that old Aleppo building, which had been redone for tourists, nor its turned-wood footstools, plush cushions, and brass tea trays. I was expecting something a bit closer to a Marrakech bath I’d visited years before, a graceful shell with a gritty concrete finish. Here in Morocco, where many medina homes could not accommodate private baths, the hammam was still a local institution, and function often took precedence over form. In Chaouen, the stairs dumped us into an even rougher place than I had anticipated, a fluorescent-lit changing area with all the ambiance of a YMCA locker room.
“Um, honey?” my mother said, peering around me. I gripped the bucket handle and gave her a determined smile.
A very small woman was waiting for us. Bundled in flannel pajamas, leg warmers, and a sweater, with a towel around her waist and one over a shoulder, she was dressed for work in a walk-in freezer, not a steam room. In a mishmash of high-pitched syllables—Darija? Berber? I couldn’t tell—she directed Beverly and me to undress. She took our bucket, and we followed her down a white-tile-lined hall.
After several turns, past dark and joyless single bath stalls, she threw open a door to reveal a low-ceilinged, rough-walled room with tiled bench seats for twenty. It looked like the worst wing of a mental ward. “Huh,” Beverly said politely.
The tiny attendant switched on the tap in a deep tub in the corner, then walked out, pulling the door tightly shut behind her.
“This isn’t like . . . other . . . hammams I’ve been to,” I conceded. “I guess we wait?” I wasn’t able to deduce anything from the words the attendant had uttered before leaving.
We took our seats on the bench. The steam rose and my worries eased. So the setting wasn’t splendid, but the climate still worked its magic. And I wouldn’t have to speak for at least an hour.
“Well, we may as well start,” I said as moisture beaded on my skin. We didn’t need the attendant for the first step.
I unpacked our bucket and filled it with hot water, then directed Beverly to slather every visible patch of skin with the saboon baldi, the black olive-oil soap. Baldi, which means country-style or native, was a thoroughly positive adjective in Morocco, at least according to Si Mohamed, who had taught my class the word and its opposite, roomi, foreign (literally “Roman”). Baldi tomatoes were lumpy but superior; baldi clothes were sturdy and warm. Roomi products were big and shiny, often cheap, but reliably awful—as Si Mohamed had conveyed in a pantomime involving a plump but tragically bland chicken. So, baldi soap for us—we would not be fooled by its resemblance to axle grease. With the luxuriant goo rubbed to a light lather, we lay back against the tile and waited.
The roly-poly attendant reappeared. “Kees?” she asked, holding up the flat of her hand. We showed our crêpe de Chine mitts. The woman took Beverly’s and went to work. As the attendant scrubbed, Beverly’s skin emerged, inch by inch, a vivid pink, tender and thrumming.
The attendant gestured to Beverly’s crotch. Washing there was not the attendant’s job, but she watched over Beverly like a stern mother, making sure she did it. She scrubbed me, and marched out again, without a word.
We sat against the wall, all aglow, like snakes slithered out of old skin. I was briefly sad that we had been sequestered in this apparently private room. Half the pleasure of the hammam was the camaraderie of being naked with strangers—young and old, taut and sagging, brown, white, and wheat-colored, but all bent on a common task. At the hammam I had visited in Marrakech, a young woman had walked through, a virtually perfect specimen, all youthful curves and cascading curly hair. In clothed life, I probably would have felt a pang of envy. In the communal heat of the hammam, I felt proud that we humans could be so flawless, sometimes.
Meanwhile, my mother and I were flawed in all the usual aging-human ways: squishy in spots, scarred in others, dressed in baggy, sodden underpants. I directed Beverly to move on to hair-washing. I poured warm water over her silver hair until the suds were gone. Parents loom so large, but here she was small, each vertebra visible—so much smaller than I remembered her from when I was young, and smaller than I imagined her back in the day in Morocco, striding into adventures alongside my father.
When we were all rinsed and scrubbed down to our toes, we wrapped ourselves in towels and flip-flopped out to the dressing room, where we sat to cool. “Honey, that was wonderful,” my mother said. “I can’t stop touching my skin!”
Walking back up the hill to our apartment, I heard a voice call out in English, “So, you’ve been to the hammam, yes?” It was the owner of a shop we passed several times a day; he had spotted our bucket and our dazed smiles. “Bsahha!” he said as we passed.
That was a nice Darija expression, like bon appétit but with a broader application: good meals, good baths—enjoy them “in health,” as it literally means. It was used so frequently that it was the one case for which I had managed to memorize the proper God for All Occasions response.
“Allah ya’teek as-sahha!” I sang back to him. May God give you health.
On our last day in Chaouen, Patrick and I went down the hill to buy a souvenir for Beverly’s brother. The shop owner who had wished Beverly and me good health the night before whisked us into his place, deep inside a back room. I explained what we were looking for: a light summer djellaba for my khal, my maternal uncle. Soon we had Patrick shimmying in and out of various robes, testing for fit. The shop owner and I covered the usual small talk in slowed-down Darija: where was I from, did I like Morocco, and what was my name?
I told him the story I usually told: my mother and father lived in Morocco before I was born . . . But this time it had more color, because here was my father, in the flesh! And he had seen my mother just the night before, did he remember? She had chosen my Moroccan name, from a woman they knew in Tangier.
“Oh, Zora?” the shop owner said. “It’s a Moroccan name, as you say. But you know, that’s not the full name.” He paused to adjust the shoulders on the sedate navy-blue robe Patrick was modeling.
“The name,” he said, turning back to me, “is Fatima Zora. Or, as you would say in Fusha”—he dropped his voice and enunciated slowly, shifting the rhythm of the syllables—“FA-tima az-ZAH-ra’.”
Fatima az-Zahra’! Fatima was the powerful daughter of the prophet Muhammad, and az-Zahra’ was an epithet: the Most Resplendent. The Darija accent had given the vowel a little curve, smoothed over the light h, and erased the stutter from the end, but still, not too shabby a name. Plus, my inner grammarian noted, it was a feminine superlative adjective, a relatively rare morphological form.
I recalled a comment Si Taoufik had made in class, about how women didn’t like to be called by their names in public. If he needed to get his wife’s attention in the street, he would say “Meela” instead of her full name, Jameela. So mine was the public name, not the full private one.
And now that the shopkeeper had said the name slowly and clearly, I could picture it—فاطمة الزهراء—and I realized I had passed up my personalized-keychain opportunity. At the street fair in Fes where I’d eaten
the cotton candy, there had been a keychain that said Fatima-something, but I had set it aside without reading it all. Oh, and maybe that was why Btissam’s housekeeper, Fa-TI-ma, had always squeezed me so hard—we were name-sisters. One offhand comment from a stranger and I was starting to see where I fit in Morocco.
“I think Fred would like this one,” Patrick said. He had put on an elegant cream-colored djellaba.
The salesman reached up to adjust the hood, pulling up its point and folding over the front edge, then stepped back to admire. “There,” he said, his mustache puffed with pride. “Doesn’t he look Moroccan now?”
I had grown up seeing Patrick in a djellaba. He didn’t look Moroccan, he looked like my father.
Crossing the Bridge
“Let’s go back to the Ourida,” Beverly proposed. We were in Tangier again, on her last day in the city. “I want to see if I can remember the way.” She was no longer as tentative as when she had first arrived. She had started taking satisfaction in navigating on her own, first through the Fes medina, then Chaouen’s. Tangier was the final test.
I wanted to go too. Since our earlier visit to the Ourida, I had begun to imagine a scene in the alley that led from the hotel’s back door. One of the houses there, my mother couldn’t say which one, was where my namesake had lived. In the scene in my head, we were standing by the Ourida’s back door, and Zora-the-laundry-woman would enter the lane, on the way back to the house where she still lived after all this time. She would immediately recognize my mother and grab her in a warm embrace, kissing her, tak, tik-tik. I would explain in flawless Arabic what my parents had been up to the past forty-odd years, and then I would modestly introduce myself. We would all go into Zora’s house to drink mint tea and hear how her life as a single mother had turned out. Because it was my imagination, she would have a triumphant, positive story, free of the usual constraints and frustrations. Together we would celebrate our independent natures.
Beverly led us from the Petit Socco, bearing left, right, left, following her own memory lane. Patrick chimed in now and then, confirming a correct turn. “Here’s where I came to wash the dishes,” he said as we passed under an arch by a public water tap. A man in an undershirt was standing in front of it, brushing his teeth. (“Bsahha!” I told him, for lack of a better greeting. Enjoy your teeth in good health.) This place was embedded in a fable. The shops and decorated doors we passed flickered in my parents’ memories, and flashed bright and new in mine.
“We made it!” Beverly crowed as we came around a curve and recognized the green back door of the ex-Ourida.
I took a picture of her there, looking triumphant. Irrational as it was, disappointment was creeping around the edges of the scene. My Zora was not here, of course. The lane was silent, all the doors shut. From an upper-story window, two girls waved shyly at us. There was not much more to do in this dead-end street.
A door creaked open.
“I think that was Zora’s house,” Beverly whispered. I had learned my magical thinking from her, so she had probably envisioned the same meeting.
An older woman peered around the door frame at us. Her long hair was braided and tucked under a flower-print scarf, and her mouth was sunken, as if around missing teeth.
I caught Beverly’s eye. Would she recognize her friend after all these years? She gave a minute shrug.
I walked over to the woman in the doorway and told the story. My Arabic was smooth, assured, correct. “My parents lived in that hotel for a while, back in the old days,” I said, pointing across the lane to the green door. “They were friends with a woman who lived on this street. Her name was Zora. Do you . . . know her?”
The woman looked up at me, the corners of her mouth curling in a modest half-smile, protecting her toothless gums.
“Zora, you said?” she wheezed. “Heh, no.”
A trio of kids dashed out a nearby door, running down the lane in a mad game of tag.
“That’s a very common name, you know,” the woman continued over the children’s clamor. She jutted her chin toward one of them, a girl with pigtails. “That one’s called Zora. And so’s her cousin, and her aunt.”
As the woman was gesturing toward the girl, her friend called out, “Zoooorrraaa!”
My name story wasn’t going to end with a wondrous coincidence or a heartwarming reunion. It was going to end with the realization that, even if I was technically the Most Resplendent, the daughter of the Prophet, I was also so common as to be the Moroccan version of Jenny.
I thanked the old woman, shaking my head at my own foolishness. This made her crack a big, genuine smile. “Peace be with you,” she said, and shut the door.
“Mint tea at the Café Central,” my father said through the steam of the glass delivered by the usual waiter, the one who loved the delicious ladies. He smacked his lips and let out his signature ahhh of pleasure. “I can die a happy man.”
Beverly had left that morning; Patrick and I would go tomorrow. For now, he was looking through his trip notebook, practicing the new Arabic phrases he had learned. I was reviewing my notes from a conversation with an Arabic professor I had met earlier that day.
In our brief meeting, the professor, Mostafa Ouajjani, had gently defused all my crankier, more radical ideas about Arabic—the ones I had come to suspect were wrong but couldn’t quite discard. No, he had said, just as Dr. Badawi had at the start of my travels, it made no sense to study only a dialect. Fusha was the necessary foundation. There were no shortcuts. And no, Fusha wasn’t on the brink of death, nor should it be hurried along. It was still a crucial lingua franca, connecting Moroccans to all the people along the Mediterranean and into the deserts beyond.
Here on the western edge of the Arab world, Si Mostafa was less conflicted about Arabic than most people I had met farther east. He adored the language, Fusha and dialect alike, and he was also grateful that his father had raised him to speak Berber. Perhaps location helped. Thousands of miles from the contested Holy Land and the Arabian Peninsula, whence both Arabic and Islam sprang, the language could be something lighter and more flexible, not so rigid or weighed down by history and heritage.
In Morocco, I had learned—relearned; I was always relearning—that Arabic didn’t have to be a looming concept, a complicated choice between dialects and formal structures, a vessel of scripture or poetry, a reflection of my whole self-image. It could simply be a way of creating a connection. “Moroccans will always cross the bridge,” Si Mostafa had said, characterizing the effort required to communicate in some form of Arabic or another. The delicious-ladies waiter had switched to Fusha to make sure I understood his interests. Houria had crossed a second bridge, into Egyptian dialect, for my sake.
Before he took his leave, Si Mostafa had told me the expression he’d taught his class that morning: Man shabb ʼala shay’, shab ʼalayh—Whatever one grows up with, one goes gray with. Generally, that meant we were the same at age eighty as at eight, but, Si Mostafa said, it could also refer to our interests in life and our destiny. Whatever we were exposed to when we were young stuck with us into old age. Music, writing, anything that required practice—you stepped out on that path when you were young, though you might not see it until much later.
Here at the storied Café Central, with dusk settling over the medina, I marveled at this serendipitous tongue twister, a fine motto for the end of my travels—and not just because I had noticeably more gray hairs than when I had started out the year before. I had thought I was done with Arabic for good, yet I had returned to it after all.
I had restarted my Arabic studies thinking my relationship to the language would be different now that I was older. Twenty-five, in hindsight, may have been my golden youth, but it was probably the worst age to have lived abroad and strived for fluency. Arabic, or any language for that matter, isn’t something you can learn on your own without some real awkwardness. But at that s
tage in my life, I had been too bent on establishing my independence to ask for help and to open myself up to uncertain situations. At age forty, I was more self-assured. I had freely chatted with strangers in parking lots and accepted invitations to picnic lunches and afternoon naps, and learned plenty in the process.
Yet some parts of my personality had proven annoyingly consistent. I would never, as truly gifted foreign-language speakers do, plunge into conversations as if into churning rapids, my paddle flying. I still often portaged safely along the bank, examining each and every word before speaking. I still had to remind myself to wing it (in my mother’s words, if not Dr. Badawi’s), or to ask, “You mean what, exactly?” instead of nodding and going with the flow.
And, it seemed, I would always be intrigued by Arabic vocabulary oddities, even to my detriment. The back of my notebook, where I should have been collecting God for All Occasions phrases, currently had a list of utter impracticalities such as ateet, the moaning bray of a camel, and qalah, yellowness (of teeth). But now I had made the acquaintance of Ahmed the Word Lord in Cairo, who was fine company for dictionary browsing. He had sent me emails with his newest bits of English wordplay as well as classical Arabic brain teasers.
I had not, as I had hoped at the outset, learned this language right, correcting my grad-school missteps. In fact, quite the opposite had happened. After all my country-hopping, my vocabulary was a jumble of dialects, and my precious Fusha grammar was close to broken. Nevertheless, I now felt accomplished in Arabic, in a way I never had before. I had talked my way through a minor car crash and the ensuing bureaucracy, for one thing. For another, I had gotten close enough to people in Arabic that a spark of connection had arced over the language barrier. I had the phone numbers and a standing lunch invitation from the Egyptian family I had met at the museum. Houria had already texted me, in a mix of Egyptian and Darija chat alphabet, asking if I was back in New York yet and had found her a husband.