A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (27 page)

Moments later, he almost fell off the branch, just catching himself with his tail. We watched in trepidation. It was a long fall to the courtyard, and the tiles would be unforgiving. But then a small flurry of wind lifted the leaves, and Genghis seemed to wake up to where he was. He swivelled his scaly head around, goggle eyes slowly taking in his surroundings. Perhaps being suddenly released seemed like a dream. He began to stalk delicately along the branch, his curious, prehensile feet wrapping themselves around it, heading for the uppermost leaves.

Next morning, our new house guests were still high in the tree. Their colour had deepened and was now mottled with pink, to match the branches. Genghis’s tongue flicked out at lightning speed and landed a fly. His stomach had a gentle bulge; perhaps he’d caught several more insects. I gave a sigh of relief, and the prospect of dying chameleons thudding down around our heads in the courtyard receded.

We ran a campaign on our weblog over the next few weeks and managed to convince several other riad owners to rescue chameleons and install them in their courtyard trees. Sadly, few of them survived the cats, birds and other dangers. Genghis too
gave
us frequent scares, seemingly mesmerising himself by staring at sunlit walls and then falling some eight metres to the ground. Somehow he always recovered.

AT THE BEGINNING
of August, a minor disaster struck. Mustapha called Sandy and me into the bathroom one morning to point out a trickle of water coming from a broken pipe on the other side of the wall he was repairing. This side of the house was some three metres beneath street level and as we watched, the flow of water grew, filling the room with the odious smell of sewage. In the Fez Medina, the waste-water and sewage pipes are one and the same.

‘The flow has increased because all the housewives have just started to prepare lunch for their family,’ Mustapha said. ‘You must tell the Caid.’

But it being a Sunday, he wasn’t at his office. Fatima, one of the decapo ladies, knew where the Maqadim lived and she, Si Mohamed and I set out to find him while Sandy and the workers tried to staunch the flow with sand bags. Given how much grief
the
Maqadim had given us in the past, not least the donkey hostage crisis, it felt good to be able to hassle him for a change.

The Maqadim’s house was a few streets away, and he appeared at our knock wearing his best attire of white djellaba and babouches. Although he didn’t seem thrilled about being disturbed, he obligingly came back to the riad to inspect the situation and then rang the Caid at home, who in turn said he would ring the water company.

Moments after the Maqadim had left, the temporary dam gave way. The trickle became a sudden rush, and a small waterfall of foul-smelling liquid poured in faster than our bathroom drain could take it away. The earth on the floor was quickly soaked through and water began to gush into the courtyard. This was at the precise time that Mustapha was upstairs doing his prayers and couldn’t be disturbed, so the rest of us, including Fatima and Halima, rushed to grab more bags of sand and create a channel to deflect the water into the drain next to the fountain.

When Mustapha reappeared he wanted to throw bags of sand into the drain further up the street to block it. But this would mean our neighbours’ houses being flooded instead, so we weren’t keen on the idea.

Then there was a knock at the door, which we’d left open, and a couple of burly fellows from the water company sauntered in, complete with picks, shovels and various extendable poles for shoving down drains. We cheered and whistled like a crowd at a football match. Sandy and I were impressed, and doubted anyone would
have
turned up so quickly in Australia. To give the Maqadim his due, he had actually done something about the problem.

The men from the water company trekked upstairs, out the back door, and took the cover off the manhole in the upper alley. One of them began shovelling out copious amounts of rubbish – old bottles, plastic bags, bricks, dirt, and lots of worms – which had been blocking the drain for years, forcing the water to find an alternative route by seeping underneath our house.

A small crowd gathered for this piece of street theatre. While one man kept digging, the other pushed a rod down the drain to free up any remaining blockages. As the water started to make its way through the new hole they’d cleared, the flow into the house slowed, but it did not stop entirely. The men promised to return the next day to mend the pipe, and we helped their memories along by giving them a handful of dirhams as a thank you.

The constant flow of tainted water made the house none too pleasant, so we resolved to eat out that night. But there might be a side benefit, we thought. If the number of flies increased in proportion to the stench, the chameleons would get a good feed.

We received the yearly land tax bill for the riad, made out to a name we didn’t recognise. To date, transferring any official document into our names had been far from simple, so bracing for another round with the Moroccan bureaucracy, I took the bill to yet another government office at Batha, together with the house-transfer document as proof of ownership and a
photocopy
of my passport. I was shunted around to three different people, all of whom read my documents in painstaking detail before declaring they weren’t the person to help me. It turned out I wasn’t even in the right office and needed to go next door.

There the same thing happened. The man behind the counter read every word of the two-page house-transfer document, then stared at the land tax bill as if he’d never seen one before. As this was clearly out of his league, I was taken to see the manager, who tried very hard to be helpful. He fetched a large book marked
Commune de Fez
and started to search for our house, running his thumb down the columns of names and moving his lips in concentration. When eventually he found our riad a frown flittered across his face.

‘Unfortunately, Madame, the name on the tax bill is different to that of the previous owner.’

Evidently in the thirty years they’d lived there, the old couple had never got around to changing the name on the bill to theirs. I was beginning to understand why.

Nor was this the only problem. Because we had two doors on two different streets, we were liable for two lots of tax, despite the fact that both doors led to the same house. The manager made some calculations on a sheet of paper and flashed me a figure of several thousand dirhams, the amount owing. The first portion of tax had been settled at the time of sale, but the second hadn’t been paid for at least eight years and was now horrendously large.

‘
D’accord
,’ I sighed, pulling out my cheque book. But no, it
would
not do just to pay the bill. His instructions about what I needed to do next became so incomprehensible that I told him I would return the following day with someone who spoke Darija.

Next morning, the manager told Si Mohamed we needed to go to another office in the Ville Nouvelle, where the mess would be sorted out. I could then return to this office and pay the bill. It sounded straightforward enough.

But of course it wasn’t. In the Ville Nouvelle, we traipsed upstairs and down, being directed to one office after another, where we would queue only to be told we weren’t at the right place. We ended up outside one office where people were flying back out the door so quickly I felt a surge of optimism about the efficiency of whoever was inside. Finally a charming gentleman told us that, because a new system was being implemented, his office was in such disarray it was beyond his ability to help us, or indeed anyone, and I should return the following week. In other words, it was all too hard and please just go away. So I did.

Work on the riad continued to drag. People arrived later and later and the spirit of enthusiasm that had been there at the beginning was noticeably absent. Sandy decided it was time for a little Western-style management: a team meeting.

When everyone had assembled he gave a stirring speech, via Si Mohamed, about how much we appreciated their work, how important the project was to us, and how, if they did the right thing by us, we would do the right thing by them and help
them
to find other work once the house was finished.

Sandy’s speech had a discernible effect and the pace picked up. It was as though, reminded of the bigger picture, the workers could see that they had a stake in completing the task.

Now that the unexpected river in the main bathroom had been plugged, work there proceeded briskly. The brick wall was almost complete and Mustapha had eliminated the
flambement
. The room was now considerably wider without the protruding bulge and sported a new niche in the end wall, with a light in it.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, though; there were a few injuries and illnesses. Fatima stabbed her finger on a sewing needle hidden in the wood of the salon window. It went in so deep she cried. I treated it with antiseptic and we gave her the rest of the day off. Then Halima developed severe tooth pain. A relatively young woman, she had nevertheless lost many of her bottom teeth and now one of the few remaining was in trouble. It seemed a pity to lose it for want of a dental visit, so I booked her in to a French dentist in the Ville Nouvelle. It was the first time she’d ever been to a dentist.

Unfortunately the tooth was broken and had to be pulled out. At least it was done with anaesthetic, instead of being yanked out by some tooth wrangler in the souk, and Halima was back at work the next day, thanking me with a piece of hand-weaving her husband had done.

It was some weeks since I’d seen Ayisha, but one day she arrived on my doorstep desperate and pleading. She had put off writing her final university assignment for so long, eventually
rushing
it, that she hadn’t had time to correct it. Out of kindness, her lecturer had given it back to her and said she had a couple of days to fix it, otherwise he would fail her.

I took one look at it and could see why. She’d had someone type it who clearly didn’t speak English. It was as though they’d got bored, or not been able to understand her handwriting, and a lot of sentences petered out mid-phrase.

Ayisha was an articulate, intelligent woman and she’d had months to do this assignment. ‘Didn’t you read it yourself before you handed it in?’ I asked. She tried, she told me, but found it too difficult. Huh?

The essay was supposed to be a critique of what Fez offered in the way of cultural tourism and how it could be developed. There was a wealth of material on the subject, but Ayisha had said months ago that she didn’t know how to approach it. So Sandy and I had given her two sessions worth of help with the structure, and suggested relevant people to interview and research sites on the Internet. She hadn’t followed up on any of them. Instead she’d used a couple of basic guidebooks borrowed from us, a few interviews with people she’d met in a nightclub, and not much else. Had I been her lecturer, I would have failed her too.

I couldn’t stand by and let her miss out on her degree, so I spent twelve hours rewriting the thing, putting in further references and adding footnotes. By the time I’d finished, it wasn’t brilliant but it was passable. I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing this. It was supposed to be Ayisha’s work, and if she failed it would be her own fault, but I knew she had no place to study at home, and getting a
degree
was her best chance of improving her situation. I was in a position to help her, so why not? And I was her friend, after all.