On the Shores of the Mediterranean (46 page)

By now most Jews, not altogether surprisingly, have left the Mellah and gone elsewhere, and on this day, while admittedly on the run ourselves, and subsequently, we saw no one we could positively identify as being Jewish. Of the last two of the original seventeen synagogues in the Mellah, the Sefati and the Fasiyin, we were only able to find one, and it had its doors and windows boarded up as if for ever. On our guided tour, the guide, either by accident or design, had steered us clear of the Mellah.

What still remain are the Jews’ tall, pale-washed, balconied houses, like the town houses in Spanish Andalucia, from where so many Jews fled to Morocco. They could be of any age, although most of them were probably built in the nineteenth century. In the great cemetery on the slope above the valley outside the walls, to which they were required to carry their dead at a brisk trot, their horizontal tombstones are still kept whitewashed by the custodian.

‘You do not like Moroccan peoples,’ says the pillion-riding twin, a cunning ploy at this stage of the torture, when the victim, now nearly insane, may quite easily hoist the white flag, fall on his knees and blubber,
‘Please, please
, be my guide.’

‘I
do
like Moroccans,’ I shout. ‘We
do
like Moroccans.’ By this time a small crowd has collected and is looking at me as if I had committed some misdemeanour. There is not a policeman in sight. ‘We’re just fed up with
you
! NOW FOR CHRIST’S SAKE GO AWAY!’

And to escape them we set off together at a shambling trot which eventually leads us into the Mellah.

‘FUCK YOUR MOTHERS!’ shouts the boy on the pillion, before dismounting and setting off in leisurely pursuit.

‘AND FUCK YOUR FATHERS ALSO!’ shouts his brother at the helm, the one who up to now had preserved a sombre silence, doing a kick-start and revving up preparatory to heading us off in case we make a swerve in some other direction. All of which seems to prove that in Fez, among the motorcycle-owning classes at least, there has been a marked decline in the use of religious imagery, if not in the actual practice of the religion. A few years ago they would have called us Christian dogs and hoped that our parents’ bones might rot in their graves.

Now, with a twin dogging our footsteps, we briskly cross the Rue du Mellah, which with the neighbouring Rue des Orfèvres Juifs (The Street of the Jewish Gold and Silversmiths) had contained the only European shops to be found in Fez before the modern town was built by the French, and enter New Fez by the Semmarin Gate.

The builder of New Fez, Fès el-Jedid, and the royal palace near where we had been standing, was Abu Yousef Yaacub, first of thirty Merinid sultans, a dynasty which endured from about 1240 until 1471. The Merinids dominated Barbary and the western Mediterranean and their pirate fleets terrorized the Christian lands on its northern shores. Yet, in spite of the savagery with which they treated their enemies, they were great patrons of the arts and literature.

It is difficult to contemplate the royal palace on account of the vocal twin interposing himself between us and it. The Palace of the Sultans was the royal and administrative centre of the country, and it was built of the same mixture as the walls of Old Fez by Christian slaves, many of them British. Hidden within its walls
– no admittance – are two hundred acres of gardens (one of them planted with forty-foot-high myrtle trees), huge courtyards paved with highly glazed ceramic tiles, of a sort for which Fez has been famous since the earliest times, a now disused harem commodious enough to house a thousand women, which puts it almost in the same class for this type of accommodation as the imperial harem at Topkapi, numerous pavilions, some prisons, a mosque, several parade grounds, one of which covers twenty-one acres, and a barracks. There is also a menagerie which until comparatively recently housed a variety of wild animals.

The palace and the menagerie were described by Harris, who was sent to Fez in 1908 to interview and sketch – photography was forbidden – the new Sultan of Morocco, the revoltingly cruel Moulay el-Hafid, who at that time resided in the Dar el-Makhzen.

In the course of his visits to the Sultan who, to an embarrassing extent as the days passed, came to regard him as a sort of diplomatic adviser, a role which he did not relish, Harris was taken to see the menagerie by its owner.

‘“Wait,”’ said the Sultan to Harris, ‘“and I will show thee something for thine eyes to feast upon …” Soon a live sheep was brought. I naturally thought they were going to kill the sheep, cut it up and feed the animals. But to my astonishment, the sheep was not killed, and struggling and bleating it was thrust alive into the cage of a fine tiger. The sight was most nauseating, and I had to turn my head away. As I did so I caught sight of Mulay Hafid. Such a cruel look of enjoyment I had never seen before on a human face: with glistening eyes and open mouth he thoroughly enjoyed the horrid spectacle, as the poor sheep was rent in pieces …’

Later, Harris was invited by the Sultan to be present at a public ceremony in the course of which a sheik, torn from sanctuary in a mosque, had his head and beard shaven without the use of soap
or water, the palms of his hands slashed with a knife, salt rubbed into the wounds, a round stone placed in each hand and a leather gauntlet drawn tightly over each clenched and mutilated fist, before being led off to prison with a rope round his neck, to die a lingering death. ‘Now he will write no more letters,’ the Sultan remarked with a smile.

In the Grande Rue, we stop to buy a very large tray of beaten aluminium with a folding stand which took our fancy during our guided tour. A Fasi craftsman’s answer to the problems of the air-age, previously it would have been unthinkable to make such an object in anything but solid copper or brass and therefore untransportable. It would, nevertheless, give Air Maroc a few headaches. I only hope they won’t fold it in half to get it into the machine. While we are negotiating this purchase, a twin arrives and, in a decidedly threatening manner, demands commission on the sale, in which he has taken no part, from the shopkeeper. One would have expected the shopkeeper, who is twice his size and age, to give him a thick ear and send him packing, something I have been longing to do for some time myself, being something like four times his age and three times his size. Instead, the shopkeeper shows every sign of being cowed and frightened. Is there a protection racket? If so, is this the result of putting too sudden a brake on the head-pickling business? We leave them to it.

The Grande Rue leads into a big open space, a
mechouar
, enclosed by high, crenellated walls, at the far end of which is a gate, the Bab es-Seba. Above this gate, a larger order than was customary for the picklers, but they could do it, the Infante Ferdinand of Portugal was exposed naked and upside down in his entirety for four days or years, no one seems quite sure which, six years after he had been taken prisoner while on an unsuccessful expedition against Tangier in 1437: after which he was exhibited,
this time stuffed as well as pickled, in an open coffin, for another twenty-nine days, or years. It was here, also, that the Franciscan, Andrea of Spoleto, far from home, was burned to death in 1523. Here, too, a Merinid sultan is said to have had himself walled up above the gate after his death. The Bab es-Seba is not a particularly cheerful spot, but then very little of either Old Fez, New Fez or Modern Fez can be said to be exactly jolly.

The Bab es-Seba leads into the Old Mechouar, another walled courtyard, with, so far as can be made out with the aid of an old map, the Oued Fès, the principal river of Fez, flowing secretly beneath it.

Like the square at Marrakech, the Old Mechouar has always been a gathering place for story-tellers, snake-charmers, who carry coils of snakes wound round their necks, jugglers and such like, but now in decreasing numbers. A gate in the wall to the right leads into the Bou Jeloud Gardens, which are a kind of no-man’s land between New Fez and Old Fez.

In these gardens the Oued Fès emerges to form a series of pools among groves of bamboo, weeping willows, olives and cypresses, all of which flourish here. From them a waterwheel, said to have been brought here by the Genoese, scoops up water and distributes it into conduits lower down, which take it down through the gardens of the palaces in what was the Belgravia of Old Fez. Here the rich and cultivated used to live, families who kept their own bands of musicians, and here the consulates, around which the always very small foreign colony would congregate in the hope of not being slaughtered, used to be found.

In the Bou Jeloud Gardens, looking down on the abundant waters of the Oued Fès before it continues through the amphitheatre in which the Old City stands, one begins to understand why the two cities came to be built where they were. Enormous quantities of water were needed for drinking purposes, for
watering pleasure gardens, for fountains, for all the other more mundane domestic uses and for the ritual ablutions of countless thousands of Muslims.

These headwaters and the springs outside the walls also had a strategic importance, for whoever controlled them held the key to the Old City, which was why Sultan Yousef built his palace, a garrison for his Christian mercenaries and a
kasbah
(fort) for his Syrian archers, upstream of the Bou Jeloud Pools. From this vantage point he could cut off the water supplies to the Old City, or even flood it if he wanted to, which was what the Almohads had done when they captured it from the Almoravids in 1145.

The whole of the Old City, from the highest to the lowest part, is watered by means of canals from the Oued Fès, many of them subterranean. From these canals, conduits lead off to every house. Any waste water is taken off by other conduits to flow back into the same canals that delivered it in the first place, but lower down, by which time the canals have become sewers. And from them the by now filthy waters are discharged into the Bou Khareb, a stream which eventually enters the Sebou, a river in the plain eastwards of the city.

This system, worked out in its present form in the twelfth century, with its maze of separate veins and arteries, has been compared to the circulatory system in a human body, but although it certainly makes Old Fez a city of superabundant water, it does not need a sanitary engineer to divine that there are certain problems when it comes to providing water fit to drink.

In fact why the entire population was not wiped out ages ago would be a mystery if not for the fact that anyone wishing to survive in the city either, if he was well enough off, had drinking water delivered to his door from some unimpeachable source, on muleback or by water-carriers who brought it in goatskins, or, if not, became immune to it from constant use.

Our twins appear to have deserted us. Presumably they have lost interest. There is certainly no possibility of a foreigner giving anyone the slip in Fez. Perhaps they are still engaged in putting the screws on the shopkeeper. Nevertheless, lingering in the blessed shade of the Bou Jeloud, we have already acquired several more of a similar sort, two of them, although not twins, even nastier than the originals, if such can be imagined. One can see why they work in pairs. It is less easy for someone like myself to murder two of them.

‘I wish to God I was a member of one of those groups outside the Palace wearing a label in case I get lost, with guides and leaders who would protect me from them,’ Wanda says.

‘I’d like to be Moulay Hassan II, the King. I’d have them flown to Iran and dropped in the back garden of an ayatollah by parachute,’ I say, knowing that I should be ashamed of expressing such sentiments, but I am not.

Up to now we have not opened our mouths to these new men. Now, as a last, desperate resort, Wanda begins to speak to them in Slovene, a language with which it appeared they are not
au fait
. It works. Puzzled, angered, knowing in their black hearts that they are being taken for a ride, but unable to prove it, and finally half-convinced and certainly somewhat alarmed by her, they go off in search of more intelligible prey with much fucking of our mothers and fathers.

The way into Fès el-Bali, the Old City, is through the Bab Bou Jeloud. A fine gate with an arch in the form of a keyhole and embellished with brilliant blue and green tiles, it looks old but isn’t. It was only built in 1919, but like almost everything in Morocco made or built by craftsmen using traditional methods and materials, it is an instant and total success.

Through the Bab Bou Jeloud two minarets can be seen. One has what look like a couple of golden apples speared on a finial
on top of it. The other, which is disused, has a stork’s nest. Storks, the Moroccans believed, were a mysterious people from islands beyond the seas and as such were the only foreigners they really approved of. When the secret service agent, Prince Ali Bey el-Abbasi, otherwise Domingo Badia y Leblich, born in Barcelona in 1767, who learned to speak Arabic so well that he was able to pass as a Muslim, visited Fez – having previously taken the additional precaution of having himself circumcised in London – he found there a hospital for injured storks.

Some say that Old Fez, Fès el-Bali, was founded by Moulay Idriss II in 809, and others that it was founded by his father. His father, who was also named Idriss, was a potential successor to the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad, and it was because of this that he had been forced to flee Arabia and take refuge with a tribe of pagan Berbers in what was known as El Maghreb el-Aqsa to the Arabs, the Furthest West of the Setting Sun, otherwise Morocco. These Berbers invited Idriss to become their ruler – this was in 785 or 786 – and were themselves converted to Islam. Some six years later he was poisoned by an emissary of the ruling Abbasid Caliph at Baghdad, Harun el-Rashid.