A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (25 page)

The workers were removing the last of the insulating layer of earth between the kitchen ceiling and the
massreiya
floor when they found the skull of a cat. I was intrigued. I knew that it had been the practice in many parts of the world to make a sacrifice to the gods of the earth when their domain was intruded upon by construction work: a peace offering was required. Sacrifices were also made to give strength and stability to a building, with animals replacing the original human sacrifices. In parts of Greece, they still kill a rooster or a sheep and let the blood flow onto new foundations.

There is evidence that animals and ritual objects were also used to protect homes in Western cultures. In the 1970s, a curator at the Northampton Museum in the UK realised that the steady stream of people bringing in single old shoes they’d found concealed in their houses was more than coincidental. Many such items have also been discovered during restorations to nineteenth-century buildings in London, and in the Rocks area of Sydney. They were generally found in places where it was thought witches or evil spirits could enter, such as doors or chimneys. Mummified cats, too, have been found in both countries, secreted near front doors.

Ian Evans, an Australian expert on the subject, believes the practice has a long history, a couple of thousand years or more, and that it made its way to Australia with the convicts. It ran parallel to Christianity, with people indulging in folk magic
while
going to church on Sundays. Since shoes were the only item of clothing to retain the shape of the body when not worn, they were placed in buildings in an attempt to deceive witches and spirits as they roamed the countryside at night, and to distract them from family members.

But no one I asked could tell me if the cat skull in our floor had been put there deliberately. Nor was it our only unnerving discovery. While rebuilding a section of the kitchen, Mustapha unearthed a live snake in the wall. It was a small, blind, metallic-grey thing, and probably lived on woodworm.

Even more unexpected than its discovery was the reaction of the workers, who behaved as if it were a deadly taipan. In reality it was about the size of a chisel, and not acting aggressively. Mustapha wanted to kill it, but Sandy and I intervened. A few days earlier, the workers had caught a lizard and crushed it immediately, claiming it was poisonous. Unconvinced, Sandy looked it up on the Internet and found it was not only harmless, but also rare and endangered. Now he put the snake in a plastic bag and let it go in a dry open drain, where small boys poked it with sticks until it managed to slither away.

Coincidentally, the next day, our neighbour Yusef had an encounter with a much more serious snake. It was a metre and a half long and had appeared out of a disused well in his courtyard. We learned of this when his mother came to our door asking for a bucket of sand and some cement with which to close the well.

Later we found out that Yusef, upon seeing the reptile, had run into the alley yelling, ‘Snake! Snake!’ Within five minutes, some
twenty
people had appeared brandishing sticks and bashed the poor thing to death. It seemed amazing to me that even in the most densely populated of urban centres, wild creatures could still make their homes – until discovered by horrified humans.

Yusef was an interesting character and he and Sandy had become friends. He ran a stall in the souk that was little bigger than a telephone box, where he sold spices, beans and coffee. He had a BA in English literature, which he’d studied simply because he liked it. He had a particular fondness for the writings of James Joyce, and this was somehow apt: the squalid yet glorious Dublin of Joyce’s imagination has more than a little in common with the Fez Medina.

Yusef’s knowledge of English literature had not been of great benefit to him. As many a Western graduate will tell you, it’s hard enough for those in English-speaking countries to get a job with such a degree, and in Morocco it was only marginally more useful than a degree in advanced Swahili. After six years, Yusef had given up trying to find a job suited to his qualifications and was resigned to being a shopkeeper. He would have liked to teach English, but the competition to qualify as a teacher was fierce and he couldn’t afford the additional years of study. He lived with his aging mother a couple of doors down from us, having stayed to look after her when his four siblings had married.

Their dar was small and plain, tiled with worn
zellij
. It had the simple charm of a house used for living, with little money to spare for decoration. The biggest and most impressive thing in the house was the television, which, we were proudly informed,
received
two hundred channels. It looked bizarrely anachronistic in the worn old dar.

Sandy and I had been given the grand tour. Most areas of a Moroccan house are usually off limits to all but immediate family, but Yusef led us up tiny steep stairs and through a succession of small rooms, once used for storing olive oil and winter supplies, to his bedroom on the second floor. It had a window out to the courtyard and a serious crack from floor to ceiling in one wall. There was a bare mattress with a blanket and pillow, a few clothes hanging from pegs, a desk and a set of bookshelves. This was the sum total of his worldly goods.

On the bookshelves were academic titles like
Travel, Gender and Imperialism
, along with Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, Kipling’s
Kim
and Joyce’s
Ulysses
. Yusef was shy about his own work, but after some prompting showed us a copy of his thesis, titled ‘Perceptions of Orientalism in Western Writing’. The level of language was impressive, of a higher standard than most of the essays I’d marked as a university lecturer.

From the terrace we could see a house whose roof had collapsed into the grand salon below. It had happened five or six years earlier, Yusef said, but the family still had no money to repair it.

Over tea, he told us that his distant ancestors had come from an area that is now part of Saudi Arabia. His family had lived in this dar for generations, and both his grandfather and father had worked in the Chouwara tanneries. It was such physically hard work that in winter they would eat four breakfasts, the first at five a.m. and another on the hour thereafter, for respite from the
cold
. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to spend all of every working day up to your knees in the putrid concoctions used to strip and colour the hides.

Yusef’s life was easier than theirs. He started work at his tiny stall around eight a.m., coming home at two for a long nap, then returning at five and staying until midnight. He did this six days a week. There wasn’t much room in his life for anything else, including finding a wife.

When David came to dinner a few nights later he walked into the kitchen and stood staring up at the carved and painted ceiling of the
massreiya
, high above. With his thumbs and fingers he made the shape of a square, and squinted through it.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘you could put a
halka
back in here.’

Sandy and I looked at each other. A hole in the middle of the kitchen ceiling so that we could look up and see the beautiful decoration in the
massreiya
. A type of atrium – not a bad idea. It would be surrounded by a balustrade on the floor above, and would also link the two levels of the house, giving the downstairs a sense of grandeur it currently lacked. Furthermore it would return the house to how it once had been.

But I wasn’t keen on what we would lose – a lot of floor space in the
massreiya
, which would essentially become a gallery around the four sides of the balustrade.

We slept on it, and next morning it still didn’t seem like a completely wacky idea. Not, at any rate, as wacky as David’s
previous
idea, which was to demolish the catwalk joining the two sections of the house, since it had been put in at a later date. As the stairs to the upper salon no longer existed, this would have given us no way of getting there – a minor detail.

We called Zina to get her opinion of the Hole of Amster, as we took to calling the
halka
, and after discussions with David, Mustapha and Rachid, she gave her approval. And so it was decided.

In the meantime a message was relayed from over the wall: I was wanted next door. I walked around to the entrance in the next alley with Si Mohamed, expecting to be told that more plaster had fallen off the neighbour’s wall, or that their bedroom roof was sagging from the rubble we’d piled on the floor above it. But instead I was presented with a paper bag, inside which was a pair of elaborately sequinned pink slippers – in my size.

I was amazed and touched. I didn’t know what I had done to deserve such a present. Si Mohamed said afterwards it was because I had taken seriously their concerns about plaster falling off their walls from our banging.

The building project had now been going for more than two months and we were concerned that, with roughly a third of our available time and half our budget eaten up, we still hadn’t managed to get Mustapha and his men out of the kitchen. They hadn’t yet touched the rest of the house – the catwalk that looked in imminent danger of collapse, the roof that leaked every time it rained. Getting the project finished this year was starting to look doubtful, but we couldn’t leave the house half finished when we went back to our jobs in Australia.

The more anxious we became, the more it seemed the workers dawdled. If we weren’t actively supervising – if Sandy and I went out together for a couple of hours – hardly anything got done. But what did they need to hurry for? As they saw it, when the project was finished they would be out of a job.

We both needed a break, but one of us had to stay and supervise. Sandy obligingly offered to let me go first, so with Jon and Jenny I hired a grand taxi for the day and went to the villages of Sefrou and Azrou in the Middle Atlas Mountains, south-west of Fez. Jon and Jenny were looking for carpets and furniture and I went along for the ride, with a view to buying a carpet too if the right one was to be had.

As we were foreigners, our driver needed to take our passports to a police post before we left town, something that happened on every car journey out of Fez. Then, on the outskirts of the city, we passed two policemen standing vigilantly at the side of the road, checking cars, their occupants and belongings. The heavy police presence on Moroccan roads is one indication of how hard the government is working to avoid further fallout from September 11, and to prevent the infiltration of violence into their normally peaceful society. Many arrests have been made and a number of terrorist plots diverted. In cities and towns all over the country are billboards showing a giant red hand gesturing ‘stop’, with the words ‘Don’t touch my country’ written in French and in Arabic.

The roots of the violent elements go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the US government was funding and training the Islamic Mujahideen to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Young
Arab
men looking for a cause, or just looking for trouble, were drawn from all over the Middle East and North Africa – among them a charismatic and wealthy young man named Osama Bin Laden. The Moroccans in their number subsequently founded the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group
(Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain)
, one of the goals of which is to make Morocco an Islamic state. According to
The Independent
newspaper, the bombers who carried out the 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca that killed twenty-six people, and those responsible for the 2004 attacks on trains in Madrid where 191 died, were under instruction from this group.

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sandy and I were watching the Arab television station Al Jazeera with a group of Moroccans in a café. As footage of the assault on the city of Falluja was aired, showing the maiming and killing of children, women and old people, some of the men around us grew furious, shouting at the television, hitting their fists into their palms. Others simply covered their faces. I wondered if people in Australia were seeing what we were – what their government had committed them to.

Despite the anger of Moroccans at what was being done to their fellow Muslims with the support of the West, we never felt any of it directed personally at us. Connecting with other people, foreigners included, is a very strong element in Moroccan culture. The Moroccans knew that we were as disturbed by what was happening in Iraq as they were, and they responded to us as fellow human beings rather than as a specific nationality.

Inevitably, though, there are young Moroccan men who continue to answer the Jihadist call. Moroccan authorities say that more than fifty volunteers have gone to Iraq as fighters or suicide bombers, though the real figure may be higher, since not all who make the journey are traced. But the government has cracked down on recruiting networks, including those in Algeria, and continues to make numerous arrests.