Fasting from our rooftop

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Our train carried us through olive orchards and low green hills (a comforting change from the desert landscape outside of Casablanca) and deposited us in Fez. We bargained our way into the back of a taxi-van and sat on the floor of the luggage area in the back, peering through the red window curtains as we drove from the Ville Nouvelle, through the Fez J-did and finally to the Medina (Fez is divided into three distinct sections, which are vaguely the new and more Western quarter, the old Jewish quarter, and finally the old walled city, where we live). The medina is, at first gaze, everything I could want a medina to be. The walls of the city are a light sand color, clean and smooth and high—almost as if they've been built to replicate older and more authentic city walls. The alleyways are narrow and though our house is located just inside the wall (at the edge of a land fill), you have to wind through just enough of the narrow alleyways to reach it in so that you truly feel that you have entered an ancient walled city. Our room is on the fifth and last floor, just next to the entrance to the roof; the light was fading just as we reached the roof-top and from the edge we could see the Jewish cemetery in the Fez J-did on one side (offset by a fading yellow and blue sky and flocks of birds dancing in circles), and from the other we could look straight down into the bowl of the medina. I'm typically not one to over-romanticize, but there is an unspeakable charm about the medina (when viewed from our secret roof-top room) that lends itself to easily-won hearts like mine.

The house is constructed around an open center courtyard, so from our roof-top perspective we could look down upon the central social space for the family and smell the meal that was being prepared for the break-fast. Our timing was perfect and we had barely set our bags down in our hallway-shaped (long and just wide enough for two thin beds) room when we heard the bells noting sunset. MC had warned me about the extended family tree that I was about to encounter, but as we descended into the courtyard and I was met by kisses and handshakes and greetings that I'd never heard before, I knew I was going to have a hard time keeping track of such an extended and fluctuating family. But in this massive family of children and grandchildren and cousins of all nationalities (American, British, German, Italian) there is plenty of room and little fuss for someone new in the household, so I was quickly handed a date (the customary iftar, or food to break the fast) and told to sit and eat. There was typical Moroccan bread with homemade butter, malawi (an oily layered bread, sometimes filled with onions), fried whole fish (which the children seemed to particularly enjoy carrying around and getting all over their faces) and pancakes and spongebread left over from the day before. The coffee was mostly milk and sugar and was served by Raja, a village-born cousin of the family who lives and works with them in exchange for food and opportunity outside of the family village.

The most incredible thing about this family, to me, is the ease with which MC fits into it all. She has red hair and freckles and by no means blends into this Moroccan family with light Berber skin and dark hair. But to the grandchildren—who are clearly the pride of this household and seem to rule it with their shrieks and constant demands to be fed—she is clearly just another of the loving aunts and playful uncles. After sharing bread with Saida and talking to Nazwa about her henna, MC walked into the courtyard and immediately won the hearts of all the little ones. Ayoub (Youssef's 2 year old son who lives in Frankfurt and is a budding soccer star) ran circles around MC with a chunk of bread in one hand and a truly devilish laugh on his face, clearly thrilled that he had found someone who would put up with his limitless energy and enthusiasm for keep-away. At least twice when Omar (11/2 year old son of Nazwa, one of the three daughters of the household, and the oldest one who lives at home) was upset and crying he called "mamama" and reached for MC, instead of his mother. And when one-year old Elias (son of Mohammad and his British/American wife Anna) fell, MC walked over and scooped him off the ground, just as if she were one of the women of the household, sharing cooking and child-care duties.

We eventually escaped the entreating arms and cries of the children (at one point all three of them were standing at MC's feet, crying and asking to be picked up; she simply kissed each of them on the forehead and hugged them all at once) and took a walk through the medina. It was around 8 at night, when the shops were still closed for break-fast but life was starting to stir again in order to open for the night-hours that they keep for Ramadan. The medina truly is a bowl, with the center of life sunk at the bottom of a maze of criss-crossing alleys and walkways (the medina is closed off to cars, motorcycles, and most bikes—it is the largest pedestrian-only space in the world), and we descended into the bowl, past mosques with lines of men praying in white caps, past hamam bath houses where families go for weekly cleanings, past shops selling the dyed leather goods that Fez is famous for, and past the butcher row where hooks hung empty, waiting to be heavy with camel and goat meet in the morning market. There were some female shop owners, a few young girls playing in the alleys, and a pair of sisters about our age, chatting together and eye-ing us watchfully as they filled buckets of water at the tap. Most of the people on the street, however, were men. Young men running small shops, little boys beating each other up in the middle of the walkways, older men walking home from the mosque. There were plenty of stares and obnoxious comments sent in our direction, but the pestering seems harmless and I was amazed at how safe I felt walking through unknown neighborhoods at night in a country where I had been told it was extremely difficult to travel as a woman.

After our walk we returned to our roof-top home and spent a good deal of time trying to make all of our stuff and two beds fit into our long-skinny-palace. We listened to the new Beirut and Kanye West CDs that I had brought (we can't, after all, leave everything behind, and music is the easiest way to maintain those connections) until it became clear that if we were going to wake up in a few hours to eat the mid-night meal, we might as well attempt to get some sleep.

At 2:30 am (after an impossible sleep made difficult by the fact that I knew I was about to be woken up) Saida came to our door to tell us that dinner was ready, if we wanted to eat. So we dressed ourselves appropriately and shuffled down in our slippers to the salon on the main courtyard, where under the tall ceilings and the single chandelier, men and babies slept stretched out on cushions while the women started to pile plates of food on the two tables (the usual dinner crowd of fifteen or so people doesn't fit on one table). Karim waved his hand at me dismissively when he found out that I too was vegetarian and returned with a plate of white beans floating in spiced oil that was placed before MC and I. Most of the food is put out communally for people to tear off, dip in and scoop up as they please, so we shared small bowls of cucumbers and pomegranates and dipped bread in our beans as the men at our table worked on their own beans with chicken and vegetables. Omar sat happily on MC's lap and the conversation (alternately in Moroccan Arabic, German and English) ran in sleepy circles as everyone focused on getting enough food in them to last them through the next day, the last day of fasting.

When the plates had been taken away many of the sons and uncles of the family cleared a space on the floor to play cards. When I was caught watching the game, one of the aunts teased me and asked me if I knew how to play; before I knew it I was on a team with Karim and quickly learning the strange rules of double-decked Moroccan rummy. We ate honey-glazed peanut butter sweets that we had watched Nazwa prepare just a few hours before and watched Mohammed school everyone game after game until the reality of tomorrow morning started to set in.

We made our way upstairs, where we changed back into our pajamas and went out onto the roof to brush our teeth. As MC showed me her favorite star (one of the perks of the romantic roof-top lifestyle) we heard the sound of a single drum, which MC says is played in each neighborhood to make sure that everyone woke up and ate before sunrise. We peered over the wall and saw the player himself, walking by himself down the outer wall of the medina and banging his drum to do his religious duty. We crawled into bed just before 5 am as the first call to prayer sounded, beautifully sung in solitude until it was joined by the calls of all the neighboring mosques, each battling to be heard over the others until they sounded like a chorus of bleating lambs. An appropriate lullaby for my first night in Fez.

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