Learning how to live in Fes

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I suppose it is to be expected that we finally feel like we are getting good at living in Morocco as soon as we are bound to leave. With only seven days left it seems as though we are just mastering some of the basic tasks of daily living. I refer mostly to the fact that I just successfully pulled off a feat of rather impressive qualifications.

From the moment of my arrival in my new home in Fes I was immediately in love with my rooftop room—gorgeous views of the medina bowl during the day (black smoke rising from the tanneries) and, from the opposite vantage point, nighttime glimpses of dramatically lit forts and old city walls (standing solemnly on hillsides, as if to serve as reminders of the centuries they have witnessed in this ancient city). Almost as quickly as I had moved in, however, I discovered the only problem with the living situation: our room is on the fifth floor of an old house in the even older medina, and electric wiring had clearly been applied some centuries after the house was originally built. Only half of the four flights of stairs, therefore, are lit, and even the switches for those are difficult to find and rarely used. So on my first evening in Fes I found that my sister was practically downstairs in the family room while I was still groping my way down the second flight of stairs. For the first few weeks I took to bracing myself against the side walls as I ungraciously made my way down unevenly spaced stairways, sometimes holding on to MC’s shoulders in the dark as she patiently guided her useless older sister down to the ground floor.

Eventually I became familiar with the stairways, even remembering intuitively which flights had nine steps and which had ten, and the location of the particularly deep steps that could make you lose your balance if you weren’t prepared for them. But tonight, I passed the test of ultimate familiarity.

Tahara and Ali have left Fes for Tahara’s village to see her parents off before they leave for Germany to visit other family. They left the keys with us (there is only one set, so it was an exciting moment of trust when they were handed over) and told us it would just be us and Siham. Despite our protestations, Siham insisted on feeding us tonight, and arrived at our doorway this evening with a tray of olives, bread and jam and two glasses of milk. We sat on the floor with our baguettes and our jar of amlou (the Moroccan version of peanut butter, made with aragan oil, peanuts and almonds), listening to the Marrakchi rap that we had just purchased and going over our final list of gifts for friends. When we were finished I set off downstairs with the tray, and it wasn’t until halfway down the second set of stairs that it dawned on me how proud I was of myself: not only had I just anticipated the deep step (number 6) on the second stairway from the top, but I had maneuvered it adeptly with a tray in my hands that held two empty glasses.

Ya, I suppose it’s not so impressive to anyone else, but these are the kinds of the things that make us feel at home. So of course it is just now that such small revolutions are taking place. Last night at dinner I finally learned how to properly eat using only my thumb and first two fingers (all along I had been eating the South Indian way—five fingers plunging shamelessly up to their knuckles in food).

And in the middle of that same meal MC had her own small revolution. She broke the comfortable silence of dinner with a loud and properly pronounced “SHBET!” She wasn’t actually full, which is what she was proclaiming loudly, but she was practicing her improved version of the guttural and croak-like “eh” sound that makes the middle of the word. Ali and Tahara burst into giggles (Ali especially, because of his firm belief that for a long time the only word that MC knew was “shbet”). This only further proved our conviction that we were in with the family. We had decided that this was the case when we realized that we had inside jokes with both Ali and Tahara (who don’t speak English or French), and that these jokes were mostly at our expense. It is a beautiful thing to be teased and loved by people you can barely communicate with.

Last week I ran into the hamam woman on the street: she kissed me (“Labaas?”) and scolded me for having been gone for too long. Today on our walk down into the depths of the medina, we encountered at least half a dozen people who recognized us. “Salaam alaykum!” We had passed so many similar walks wondering whether anyone knew who we were, and now we knew. The Fassi world seems to finally be folding us into its rhythms—just in time to bind us tighter to the city, to strengthen our ties before we stretch them across continents. In a week we will turn our backs on the ancient walls of the medina, and there is no telling whether anyone will notice or remember us if we return, but we will know that for at least a brief amount of time we learned how to live in Fes and Fes learned how to live with us.

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