A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (16 page)

Omar took us to see another house he was working on,
a
project with which an Australian man we knew had been involved for a while, before he fell out with the owner. I rang him to get the low-down.

‘Omar will be trouble for you guys,’ he said.

It seemed Omar was a good builder but he could slip up through inattention and he was money-hungry. What builder wasn’t? I wondered. The price Omar had quoted us seemed ridiculously cheap, but we planned to pay a day rate so he couldn’t rush the job.

Our friend had some good advice: we should also pay a monthly bonus to keep Omar on track and prevent him going off to someone else’s better paying job in the interim. We’d need to buy the tools for his team ourselves, and most of these would go walking if we didn’t keep an eye on them, along with our mobile phones and anything else we had lying around. I had a vision of hordes of heavy-footed, light-fingered tradesmen invading our peaceful space, and felt a shiver of apprehension. Still, if not Omar then who?

But when we made him an offer he would only take a job rate, saying he wanted to be free to do other work. Just what we didn’t want, someone who showed up for a day and then disappeared for five.

I had an awkward loose end to tie up: telling Hamza we wouldn’t be engaging him to manage the restoration. I had been dreading this, not least because Hamza and his carpenter
hadn
’t yet returned to assess the work we were still owed. If Hamza was no longer involved, there wouldn’t be much incentive to ensure the work was finished.

But I needn’t have worried. Hamza was gracious and affable. I started by saying that I knew he was terribly busy. Yes, he conceded, he was indeed busy. And, I continued, we knew his work was wonderful but his price was out of our league. We simply couldn’t afford him. I saw him relax when I said this. I think he was secretly relieved that he didn’t have to take on yet another job.

He was probably also thankful not to have me for a client. I’m the hands-on type who wants to know everything, that building managers dread. Most would prefer you to give them the money and then bugger off until the job is finished, with maybe an occasional pretend consultation before they go right ahead and do what they were going to anyway.

My meeting with Hamza ended amicably, our friendship intact, and I left feeling much relieved. He promised to come to the riad with his carpenter in the next few weeks to sort out the rest of the work.

LIFE IN THE
Medina had its surprises. One evening around nine, there was a knock on the back door. As Sandy was out I ignored it, but then came insistent raps on the front door.

‘Madame Suzanna,’ a voice called out, echoed by that of a child.

I suddenly realised who it was and ran to let them in. Khadija was full of emotion, hugging me and showering kisses, and Ayoub turned his face up to be kissed. Our conversation was as complicated as ever, with her French worse than mine, but eventually her story came out.

Khadija’s family had not moved to the countryside after all, but to a suburb on the outskirts of Fez. Her husband had lost his job and they had to move somewhere cheaper. As Abdul had seemed permanently stoned and was pretty haphazard when it came to work, I could well imagine that his employer had
had
enough of him. Khadija was still embroidering slippers at home for a pittance to support the family. She asked if I had any cleaning work for her.

Having decided against employing Damia again, it was a timely request. And if things worked out I could probably find Khadija more work with other expats. I gave her the sheets I’d brought from Australia and she was thrilled. I think it was probably the first set of sheets she’d owned in her life. Ayoub was ecstatic about his paint set and immediately started using it. He would be starting school next year, Khadija told me, and she couldn’t wait to have some free time to herself.

Their new place was an even tinier room in another shared house, and I gathered her son was driving her to distraction, and making it hard for her to do her embroidery. I thought, but didn’t say, that having Abdul at home all day couldn’t be helping.

Khadija came to clean a few days later, and all was well for the first hour. Then her dopey husband turned up with Ayoub in tow. He sat at the table chain-smoking and chattering incessantly, preventing her from doing her job properly. I didn’t understand why, if he was out of work, he couldn’t mind Ayoub somewhere else and let Khadija get on with it.

Abdul’s presence also hindered my own work, a spot of editing for Sandy, who was on a tight publishing deadline with a novel. When Australian friends dropped in for a cup of coffee Abdul was taking up one of our scarce chairs. He eventually had the good grace to move, but sat two metres away on the edge of the fountain, staring intently while we talked.

After Khadija, Abdul and Ayoub had left, I noticed that a bright yellow hand towel was missing from the kitchen. It had been hanging in the centre of the wall at eye level, and the three of them were the only people besides us to have been in the kitchen that morning. It was such a stupid thing to steal that I wondered whether Khadija thought I hadn’t paid her enough. Yet I had given her as much for three hours work as Abdul used to get for eight hours as a parking attendant. Sandy suggested she’d taken it home to wash, but it never reappeared. I hoped Abdul had been the one to take it, but there was no way of knowing for sure. I didn’t care about the towel itself; it was the betrayal of trust that disappointed me.

Khadija turned up a few more times. I gave her tea but I didn’t offer her any more work. She asked if we would employ Abdul on our restoration, but he hadn’t a hope in hell. Eventually she stopped coming, and the last time I saw her was five months later, when she was pregnant once more.

While things with Khadija didn’t work out, my friendship with Ayisha was flourishing, and we took to going to the
hammam
together. To get to her favourite one we had to walk through an area of the Medina called Ras Jnaan, which meant ‘top of the garden’. Hundreds of years ago, it was the site of the market gardens that supplied the city. As Fez expanded, wealthier people moved from the city centre to build grand houses at Ras Jnaan, displacing the gardens. Now the area was forlorn and neglected, its houses in varying degrees of ruin.

Walking uphill, we clambered over a pile of rubble from a
recently
collapsed dwelling that was blocking the alley. Half of the house still stood, a surreal cross-section with stairs that led nowhere and floors abruptly cut in two.

Further along, Ayisha pointed to a large dar on a corner where a friend of hers had lived when they were children. The family had moved away now and the house was uninhabited, its massive carved doors padlocked. I longed to go inside and take a look, and wondered whether someone would rescue it before it fell into terminal decline.

The house was so big and its corridors so dark, Ayisha confided to me, that she had been too terrified to stay overnight.

‘I imagined the djinns were waiting for me,’ she said.

‘Tell me about these djinns,’ I prompted. ‘I’ve heard they live underground?’

‘Oh, come on,’ she laughed. ‘I don’t really believe in all that stuff.’

‘I’m not asking if it’s true or not. Just what people around here believe.’

She narrowed her eyes at me, as if assessing whether to go ahead, then nodded slowly. ‘Well, some people think that if you go to a ruined building at night you’ll see the djinns, and they’ll hurt you. There are some houses nobody wants to live in because they’re haunted. If you go there djinns can enter your spirit and possess you, and if that happens you don’t sleep well. If you’re still single you cannot get married. And if you are married you won’t have children.’

I was intrigued. ‘So what are they like, djinns? Are they the same as what we call ghosts, the spirits of dead people?’

She looked doubtful. ‘Djinns are a kind of spirit, but they are independent beings, made by Allah from fire that does not smoke. Some people say they live under the ground, in communities. They are both male and female, with names and families, and they live much longer than us. They have their own stories. And they can be in conflict with each other, just like us. Djinns share everything with you, but they do things in the opposite way. They sleep during the day and come out at night. They find their way out into our world through places where there is water. That is why you must cover your drains.’

Moroccan squat toilets are plugged with stoppers, and drainage holes in floors and courtyards are covered with pieces of marble or large stones. I had always assumed that this is to prevent rats and cockroaches coming up from the sewers.

Ayisha’s face showed how much she was enjoying this role reversal, the young woman imparting wisdom to the older. ‘If you pour boiling water down drains or in the cracks in the floor you can hurt the djinns. Then you will be punished.’

Reaching the
hammam
, we stripped to our knickers, paid for and collected our buckets and went into the inner room to fill them.

‘You cannot leave your children alone or a djinn might possess them,’ Ayisha said thoughtfully as she scrubbed herself. ‘Their faces will change, everything will change. They will grow up differently. I once saw a girl, only eight months old, crying in such an ugly voice. Nothing about her was normal. Her mother said she had left her for a few moments to go to the fountain in the street, and when she came back the child was in this state.’

‘Couldn’t the mother do anything?’

‘She went to see a fakir, a Sufi who knows magic, and he told her to put her baby in a dirty, deserted place at night so the djinn would have a chance to return to its own kind. But the mother could not leave her daughter all alone for a night, and said she would accept her as she was. It was Allah’s will.

‘If someone is mentally disturbed,’ Ayisha went on, ‘and talks to himself and does strange things, people think he is possessed by a djinn and can harm you.’ She paused, unsure whether to continue, and when she did it was in a low, embarrassed whisper. ‘Once, a few years ago, it was very hot and I was sleeping on the terrace with my mother. At two-thirty in the morning I opened my eyes and in front of me I saw a thin black man. As I watched he started to grow very, very tall. I was so afraid I could not speak, I could not cry out. I don’t believe in djinns but I saw him. From that day on I could not sleep there.’

She covered her eyes at the memory and I could see she was disturbed by it. Time to change the subject.

‘Are there other sorts of spirits besides djinns?’

‘There are
marids
– they are the most powerful type of djinn. They are proud and arrogant. They are called blue djinns because their skin is blue and their hair always looks wet and wavy, as though they are under water. There are also
mlouks
, who can possess you simply because you are beautiful, or different in some way, or because they want what you have. So if you are different you better watch out.’

‘And can people ever have friendships with djinns and those other spirits?’

‘Yes. To make friends with djinns, you offer them milk or powdered henna, or burn incense. But you need to be careful because they have many tricks. If you need help you go to a fakir, and he will call on a
marid
. If I take a fakir a photo of the person I want to marry, he will ask a
marid
to fill this person’s thoughts with me. Or if I have an enemy the
marid
can make trouble for them.’

Ayisha took a breath and followed this story with an even more extraordinary one. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘women will go to the cemetery and dig up the body of a newly buried person and cut off the hands. They use the hands to make couscous for someone they do not like. They give it to them as a present, and once that person eats the couscous he will never be happy again. He may even get sick and die. It is a curse.’

I’d never heard anything so macabre. ‘But how do they use the dead hands to make couscous?’

‘They take them home and wash them, then they hold them like so.’ Ayisha reached across and took one of my hands in hers, stroking my palm with that of her other hand, as if rubbing butter through couscous.