A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco Read Online Free PDF Page B

we’re buying the house as is and nothing must be removed.’ We’d met expats in the Medina who’d had windows and doors stripped by the owners after the completion of sale. These items fetched big money on the antique markets of Paris and London, and we knew that the ceiling in the
massreiya
alone was worth more than the entire house.
    When my instruction was translated the old man looked pained. ‘Tell her,’ came the translation, ‘that if you find something embellished, then it won’t be unembellished.’
    The issue of vanishing artefacts was a pervasive one. A friend of David’s had recently bought a magnificent domed ceiling for his Fez house from an antique shop in Rabat. The workman installing it recognised it as one stolen from a house two doors down a few months before. The police were told, and the antique shop had to give the money back and pay for the reinstallation in the original house.
    But many inhabitants of the Medina had little else to sell but their doors and windows, so why put artefacts before welfare? David’s argument was that destruction of cultural heritage was short-sighted, and far greater numbers would be employed by tourism in the long run.
    It struck me that for people living in a city more than a thousand years old, their lifespan represented a brief flash. It was for their descendants’ sake that things needed to be preserved, but how do you deny anyone the right to modernise? Must they sacrifice their aspirations for the new because they live in an historically significant city?
    After the signing, which for the old couple amounted to a thumb pressed into a red stamp pad and then onto the paper, Sandy, Nabil and I unburdened our pockets of the bundles of dirhams and handed them to the scribe. He counted the notes, then his off sider counted them again before handing them to the blind owner. As the pile of money in the old man’s lap grew, so did his smile.
    ‘It’s the most money he will ever have in his life,’ Nabil said. ‘And it’s the last time he will see it.’ The couple were buying an apartment in the Ville Nouvelle and were looking forward to a bright, shiny new place where everything worked. No doubt they thought us deluded for wanting to buy their decrepit old house. I must confess that the same thought had crossed my own mind.
    The mediaeval transaction finally done, a jug and glasses appeared. ‘Great,’ said Sandy, shivering with a temperature. ‘A hot drink.’
    Actually, no. We toasted our new house with cold almond milk and cookies.
    ‘The owner wants to know where you come from,’ Nabil said, and when I told him the old man repeated the name with wonder. It was as though a pair of Martians had dropped in to buy his house.

    The old couple weren’t due to move out for six months, and when the time came to pay the second half of the purchase price, it inevitably proved more complicated than we anticipated. Back in Australia, we opened our Moroccan cheque book, which we hadn’t looked at since receiving it from the bank, and realised we had a problem. We stared at the incomprehensible Arabic, and the more we stared, the more confused we were about what went where.
    Then it occurred to us that we knew one Moroccan who lived in Brisbane, but it transpired that he had left Morocco before he was old enough to have a cheque book, and he was equally in the dark. ‘My brother back in Morocco is a notary,’ our friend said. ‘I could ask him.’
    I scanned a blank cheque and emailed it to our friend to forward to his brother. Instructions were eventually conveyed to us and I made the cheque out to the vendors. I posted it to Nabil and sent another letter to the bank manager in Fez, along with a photo of the old couple so that he could identify them and pay them the cash.
    As we had requested the vendors move out before the rest of the money was handed over, Larbi offered to organise a guardian to live in the house until I could return. At a cost of one