Eid el-Fitre: Ramadan ends

One of the main roads leading into Marrakech from the southeast (you almost have to take it if you’re coming into town from the airport) is Mohammed VI, the name of the present king of Morocco. The boulevard is just one of the many that run through the “nouvelle ville,” the part of town built in the early days of the French Protectorate—in the late teens and early 1920s. (The Protectorate’s first leader, General Hubert Lyautey said he had two passions, “policies regarding the natives and town planning.”) We’ve been walking the few minutes out to the boulevard from our place these last couple weeks in the evening in part to breathe a different air than what’s inside the apartment (with all its windows facing into the courtyard), in part to see the sky change from last-sun to first-star, but also to let Hazel get out her ya-yas before bath and bed (she inevitably cranks up before she winds down). And this wide, wide space with its ample sidewalks and its median that spans at least thirty feet (fountains regularly spaced, some lit from within at night, endless but sort of neglected beds of rosemary, plumbago) stretches out to mercury-lamped infinity, especially when the mountains beyond are hidden behind their nightly swath of cloud. Soon after getting here we walked a good part of its length one very hot afternoon on the way out to and back from the Menara Gardens—an enormous olive grove, rectangular basin and storied pavilion (the gardens were originally laid out by the Almohads in the 12th century)—but of course the cool of evening makes better sense, mad dogs and the English excepted. Enormous hotels, some of them chain, sit back off the boulevard, one after the other on both sides, acres of empty café chairs cluster at their bases waiting for dark and for Ramadan to come to an end. But in the waning light the empty sidewalks and fountained median, as we’ve encountered them, have been occupied primarily by what look a lot like tourists—people with backpacks hiking away from the mostly-deserted train station, European-looking couples strolling lazily here and there taking pictures of the lit palms or each other, everyone else zooming along in the dusk—little beige taxis, scooters, motorbikes, the odd Porche SUV, blue and grey French-made sedans, and once a couple tightly clutching each other on a Segue (you know—those two-wheeled long-handled tiny platforms that roll you along in an oddly static upright fashion—we’d actually already seen the driver by himself once before). Part of this phenomenon is certainly to do with Ramadan—people break the fast at home, and are presumably zooming to get there before sunset just when we’ve already eaten and are beginning our ya-ya ramble—only coming out later to take the air after we’ve gone home to keep to our 2-year old’s schedule. At any rate, Paul said tonight how different this space is from the Medina—close, intimate, pressed in together, private somehow too, with walls too high to see over, interior doors glimpsed perhaps but inevitably closed. Here—nothing but wide-open space and speed.


As we left our building in the fading light a guy on a scooter was arriving with an ornate glimmering-in-the-early-dusk silver tea pot wedged between his feet on the scooter’s central platform, together with several bowls of harira covered in foil, a promising black sack gripped in one hand. On one of the corners that we pass on the way out to Mohammed VI there’s a man who sells Winston cigarettes from a wooden box that he’s set on its end; these last two nights he’s had a tiny wobbly black and white puppy with him, and tonight a little brazier sheltered with a fold of cardboard, sparks flying up into the violet sky. We came back tonight in the near-dark and the two gentlemen who sit in the open-air (but ornately gated and elaborately arched) entryway of our building were eating, had finished mostly; we passed through the gate and they offered first me and then Hazel one of those abundantly-delectable coils of sesame-honey deliciousness. They offered her orange and mango juice, and us too—and we ate with them. I’m always knocked breathless by these moments of generosity, connection. And I need to learn the language. That is the refrain. That feeling—impotent of language—rides along beneath virtually every encounter here. I’m all for the observed drama, for green tiles and bougainvillea and lantern-light dancing beneath the dome of the dark night sky, but not really being able to listen and understand, or express to someone else (who is from here but does not speak English the way I want to speak Arabic) what it is I’m thinking, it’s almost all for nothing.


I’ve been reading this academic digestion (published in 2005) of what’s transpired between the United States and Morocco—culturally, politically—from the release of Casablanca on November 11, 1942 (just three days after the U.S. Army landed in Morocco and Algeria, thus launching the first major ground offensive of WW II), through the cold war fiction of Paul Bowles, and what he did after (among other things, did you know he published a recipe for marijuana jam in Rolling Stone in 1974?) and the brief era of the Hippie in Morocco, circa 1973 (“Don’t you know we’re riding on the Marrakech Express,” sing Crosby Stills Nash and Young; my brother-in-law had to show me a live version of this song on youtube— I’m a child of the 70s, but only because I know The Brady Bunch, not because the music, circa age 4, is mine). The author of Morocco Bound, Brian T. Edwards (Northwestern) has academic ties to several universities and cultural studies centers in Morocco, clearly speaks Arabic and its Moroccan variety (Darija), and unfolds a capacious and convincing explanation of the forces that shape, have shaped, our domestic view of this place—as well as the ways in which we need to learn how we in turn are perceived. Among other books on Morocco in circulation, he makes reference to the first “guide-book” to the country written in English, Edith Wharton’s In Morocco (in 1917 she was squired about for a month in a Protectorate-driven jeep)—and the more you read, the further down the rabbit hole of connection you’re pulled. Who hasn’t been here? Churchill had his favorite suite in the storied Marrakech hotel La Mamounia (famously reopening at the end of this month after a facelift that will redefine the term, I’m sure); Hitchcock filmed his second take on The Man Who Knew Too Much on location in Marrakech; at least two of the Beatles and some of the Rolling Stones crashed here, and as I’m late-night surfing the HuffPost, Vanity Fair or some-such on-line, I find that one starlet or another does her bargain-shopping not in one particular store in one particular city, but in Morocco, the country. For some people, of course, the whole country is cheap.


At the end of the first week of classes we invited over several other teachers who live in our part of town—an easy way to hang out with adults while Hazel careens about with other kids and can crash or get a hug when she needs to. Selfish invitation, but a good trick. My point is that I heard stories about a Marrakech that I have not experienced—after dark at Pasha, “the biggest club in Africa”—girls dancing in cages, prostitutes (“They were, weren’t they?!!”) lounging about or being proffered, night-time splendors and sparkly excesses. Someone else talked about leaving a bar at 4AM and deciding to walk instead of catching a petit taxi, and then being surprised by a guy who pulled a knife. He was a kid, basically; the two women (one a more-than-fluent French speaker) made some noise, and then got help from obliging and sympathetic people who happened to be there too. Another plays soccer with a local semi-pro club, and Paul comes back with a story about a girl whose maid wakes her with chocolate milk every morning, excepting those during Ramadan. And a couple days ago on Sunday night, what turned out to be the last night of Ramadan, we saw two girls dressed partially in riding gear—jodhpurs, tall boots—heading into the McDonald’s at the train station. There’s money here too.


We’ve been here during a time that’s not typical—these last four weeks have happened in an altered state. And because Ramadan arrives each year according to the lunar calendar (and the time it comes shifts eleven days back each successive year), it has been almost a full generation since Ramadan fell right at this time, one of the hottest of the year. Is it new then, this experience, for everyone? On that recent Sunday evening walk we started out earlier than usual, in full sun, taking a different route, heading down a street parallel to Mohammed VI, this one narrower, residential, through part of the affluent Hivernage neighborhood (again, what the French built). Lush blooms from some of the walled houses and quieter hotels spilled out onto the sidewalks, the entire green corridor bordered by mature silver-leaved olive trees; we could see into the gloom of heavily shaded side-streets (So this is where the BMWs go at the end of the day! I found myself saying to Paul), and as we turned west and headed out to Mohammed VI, the feel was different. Something had lifted. We saw joggers along the shaded median of a busy cross street (and again on Mohammed VI once we joined it)—all of them men, but still. Two tricked-out cyclists on serious road-bikes zipped by us (one even with a helmet). Families strolled with children or sat on benches where before we’d been almost alone. People laughed. A white Mercedes (father and son in the front seat?) flashed by, and several black VW Touaregs (another subject entirely). Was it the beautiful Sunday evening, clear and cool? Everyone out for a spin or a promenade? Or because the end of Ramadan was just so close? There’s a guy (I’m assuming it's a man) who’s been practicing an instrument out into the courtyard during Hazel’s naptime for the last week—it sounds like a cross between an oboe and a trumpet and also something else entirely. Wherever he is and whatever instrument he's playing, the sound catches in the basin of the courtyard and reaches up to all the surrounding windows. The city seems to have unfolded from the month of day-light abstention.


We went out again last evening (a couple days have passed since I began writing)—the first day of Eid el-Fitre, marking the end of Ramadan. We passed cafés filling as the sun set, the train station swarming with arrivals and peopling kissing hello (the train we saw had just come in from Fès), the two green-tiled fountains to left and right of the soaring entrance splashing away, and the chairs and tables outside the McDonald’s that give onto the wide tiled space surrounding the station totally packed with families. (The smell outside the McDonald’s is, sadly, the same as the smell outside of every other McDonald’s in the States that I’ve ever walked by or had to stand inside. I’ll go there to eat something only if I can’t think of ANYTHING else to write about. It will be a sad day, I think, if that happens—though interesting maybe in the anthropological sense. I have a feeling what I’d write.) Walking by one of the cafés on our way out to Mohammed VI Paul saw a man who lives in our neighborhood that he’s talked to on several occasions; he’s Moroccan and was sitting with another Moroccan man. I hadn’t met him before—we stopped and shook hands, spoke together in a mixture of English and French. Hazel said her soft Bonsoir and Ça va—so quietly! (She sometimes pitches those small words almost dog-whistle high.) It was an interesting moment in part because I felt we were one act of the evening’s sidewalk theater—all the café chairs arranged facing out, side by side, tables in front or to one side; in part because everyone sitting on the sidewalk was a man (one woman sat inside at a window looking out). Just a tiny moment of gendered self-consciousness. The day, now fading, had been blue and clear; now out beyond the teeming boulevard the Atlas caught the last light leaning at the them from the far west, faintly rumpling their surface (creating a look like crushed iridescent taffeta from such a distance); the tiny sliver of the moon hung above the train station in the space the sun had just quit—a tension had broken. The evening felt full, bustling, a surge back into the streets. Most people we saw I’m sure weren’t hungry! In those earlier days, many of them so very hot—almost the entire time we’ve been here, actually—the feel was strained at some level, whether I was imposing my perception of people fasting and thus hungry onto the scene or because indeed there was a certain something at work in a place where most everyone was doing so. So. The fast is done, bars reopen, cafés, restaurants, the ice cream place beside us as well. And what parts of this place shift that we can’t see?

Precipitation

It has rained now several times in the last couple weeks—most recently in a sky-boiling late afternoon deluge that, after we dashed the two blocks from the bus to home, left us looking like we’d taken baths fully-clothed. The clouds, piling greys and blues and whites, had gathered in the southeast over the mountains—clear blue sky to the north and west—gathered in mass, color and intent as the otherwise sunny afternoon wore on. We got on the bus just in time it felt like, everyone looking over their left shoulder at the layered thunderheads towering, oncoming, then looking out the bus windows at the unusual grape-like curling clusters of charcoal-dark cloud almost overhead. We got to town and the skies closed to black like a curtain falling prematurely on a stage scene still lit, the rain-sound crescendo’d, the windows streamed, trees thrashed and branches came down (the traffic beyond the enormous out-of-scale bus windshield a soaking zig-zag’d pell-mell frenzy), and then it was our stop. One large step from bus to sidewalk over the gushing torrent, thought for a split-second about hugging each other and the building under an eave, and then went for it, Hazel already a drowned rat in my arms, tiny orange sundress plastered to her tiny goose-bumped frame, legs pressed tight around me. I’m sure she could feel the urgency of the moment, didn’t protest the dash or the rain, didn’t make a sound, in fact. I hugged her to me as much to keep myself warm as her and we all three ran (Paul with all our bags), waiving off the many groups of people urging us under an awning (I had to shout as we ran by, “We live just right there!” to convince people we weren’t insane in addition to being foreign). One of those moments of collective (though mild) panic, motion, witnessing. The streets had turned to rivers in a flash—three, four inches of water moving swiftly to where?—gone by morning except for the innocent glisten of a puddle here and there in the freshness and sunlight of the 8AM streets.

The mountains had first appeared early last week. Paul saw them in a flash down a southeast reaching side-street from the bus as we headed off to school. A clear morning, maybe it had rained in the night, fresh-feeling and cool in a way that was new. Is this what it feels like when the season changes here? Someone, a native of Tangier, said to us recently that of all Moroccan cities, Marrakech is the only one with four true seasons. We’d been waiting for them, the mountains, wondering how high they’d be when they came out from behind the haze that seems to sit in with the heat, hunker down, press close, blot out anything but what is in the present, what is on your mind this moment—you just can’t see beyond that perfect sin-wave undulation of brown hill down that avenue, or what’s at the end of that green stretch of palm-lined boulevard down that way. But then there they were, revelation.

The Atlas tower. They float. They are close. And these days they seem to send out daily emissaries, stacked and urgent, and whether or not they deliver the message, the source of it is clear. Someone else, a native Marrakechi, explained that these weeks now, the last days of August, the first weeks of September, this is when the rains come. And then looking up at the sky from our apartment window, or out the moving frame of the bus, I wonder what the wide and busy space of the Jemaa El Fna looks like in the deluge, what the narrow cobbled streets of the souks look like when the rains pour down, what the view of the coming drama is like from the top of La Koutoubia. The mountains hug themselves around the southeast border of the city—or, rather, Marrakech gets as close to their mass as possible without crowding that bulk. The city sits at an appreciative distance. 

It turns out I latched on tight to one high school chemistry experiment in particular. In 1989 M.F. poured a liquid into a liquid and lo and behold, the two made a solid, just like that, spontaneously and seemingly out of nowhere. The pumpkin-colored bits sifted lazily down through the unappealing cloudy liquid and settled on the bottom of the beaker. That’s my vision of how things can sometimes happen—bolt from the blue, thunderbolt-sudden. One thing precipitates another thing entirely, none of the rest of it expected.

I burst into tears the other day and had to put down Reading Lolita in Tehran—nothing to do with Lolita or Tehran or reading, only Nafisi remembering how old her daughter was when a certain something happened (the daughter was eleven). I just convulsed in that way—spontaneous well of tears. In that briefest flash I was overwhelmed with gratitude for what is to come for Hazel—and of course for me, too: the years of growing and laughing and talking together (I will cry, she will cry, I know that too). But it was there for the first time—this unfurling ribbon of yet-to-happen that I could all but see, just begin to imagine. She’s beginning to tell stories (she said the other day, and I wish I had the steel-trap mind to catch her words verbatim, that Ms. Tammou had gotten a tissue for one of the kids who was crying in her class—she says this to me as we are eating lunch in one of the cozy nooks at school, sitting together on a curved stone bench that hugs the inside wall of an open-air alcove, backed by what I’ve been telling her are Hazel-size windows: she can stand on the bench and look full out onto the school’s southeast-facing view toward the mountains when they’re there)—and when she does relate a tidbit of her vision, her eyebrows go up, or she tilts her head down and looks out from beneath her bangs, or lets out a little puff of air for emphasis once she’s made her statement, or stretches both her arms up and out, fingers spread wide, when the words fail her—all these narrative flourishes have arrived in just the last two weeks. 

On the bus to school yesterday I had another thought—what are we doing here? A replication of my parents’ experiences abroad, my grandparents’, aunts’ and uncles’, brother’s even—Mom growing up in Tehran, Dad in the Peace Corps in Tunis (and again together there later), Taylor in Ain Batoum in Tunisia too, my extended family in Saudi Arabia, Beirut, India, Afghanistan, so many people in so many elsewheres. And here we are in Marrakech. Now we’re in Marrakech. Replication with what intent exactly? Connection to what exactly? My perception of the inherited belief in the imperative of the importance of knowing another place? I think of that moment growing up when I realized that if I look a little like mom, and she looks a little like her dad, and he looked like his mother a bit—how far back do you go? You go back and back endlessly searching for the original (as Virginia Woolf would have it, searching for “the thing itself”), a search embarked upon in the first place to stave off encroaching insecurities? or to erase the yawning chasm of meaninglessness just on the other side of living and doing, thinking, feeling—being? These thoughts, shuffling, reshuffling for a long time now—precipitate here, in this place.

A former student just wrote (after seeing a picture of Hazel) and said, among other delightful things, that Hazel is a perfect combination of both of us. And she is her perfect and very own self, her own original, her own source, whatever it is we have given her, whatever it is that she’ll perceive of who came before and what they did where, and in full view of what mountains.  

Today we saw the King drive by

We stand on the night-time roof of a riad in the Medina—feeling the cool movement of air, watching the moon rise in the east over the dark city, the lanterns’ flickering light set dancing by the cool air, looking around at the (now I’m counting) four-level roof terrace. Cushions and low brass tables, glasses of fresh-squeezed orange, strawberry and banana juice, potted plants (were they palms? more over-spilling bougainvillea?), narrow tiled steps leading from here up to there—who does Morocco like this? And we can see around us other rooftop terraces also lit, one with a series of at least a half-dozen arches marked out by tiny white lights. One star (which planet, really?) hangs close to the moon, and through that break in the buildings to the east I can just see the streams of people in white pouring into the plaza beneath La Koutoubia. Various windows in the mosque’s tower are lit and what we can see of the warm-sand façade, the crenellated balustrades, the final domed roof stand alone against the deep night sky.

Last Wednesday night, a week before Paul's classes began, the faculty were invited to break fast at a riad in the Medina. We met at 6:30 on the plaza beneath La Koutoubia (a space which was fitted with an outdoor speaker system amplifying the muezzin's evening prayers—completely deafening in that step or two as you passed the tripod-mounted speakers), took a group picture in the fading light (odd to be in such an obvious mass of mostly Americans and other non-Moroccans, first milling in a diverse knot then standing in two haphazard rows), then crossed the filling streets en masse and almost immediately were swallowed up by a series of tunnels and open-air passageways, twists and turns that eventually deposited us at the red arched entrance of the riad. ('Riad' comes from the Arabic word for garden, and the design—rooms arranged around an open-air courtyard, often with a fountain and green growing things—is based, they say, on the Roman villa, more specifically, those found in Volubilis, ancient Roman city to the north and east of Marrakech.) It was impossible to determine from the outside where another building began or this one left off, impossible to get a sense of perspective or scale even. And of course, we were of a group, ushered, shepherded, generally pulled along by force of numbers, the glom of us. Paul and Hazel and I and another teacher with her daughter were the stragglers of the group. We arrived by ourselves to a semi-circle of staff clad in red loose trousers, buttoned jackets, slippers with toes-curled-up and tasseled fezzes sort of corralling us all to the left (they whisked away Hazel's stroller), up a couple stone steps and over the wooden lip of the arched doorway into the dark, narrow, low-ceilinged entrance hall. 

Smiling, nodding, thanking people, shaking hands with our host, drinking in the color and light, the cascading bougainvillea (I saw a single white blossom flutter down from way up there to land on the water’s surface), the carved ceiling above, palm fronds, roses trained along lengths of twine reaching up, the quietly burbling fountain and the orange fish in the green pool, a rectangle of dusk-blue beyond the arches two stories above us—trying to take it all in. Here was a situation where I felt particularly foreign, not even necessarily American—just one of a crowd, together with people I'd only just met or barely met, wondering what we looked like to the fleet of wait-staff. (These men were more than engaging with Hazel, chucking her under the chin, grinning at her, touching her cheeks, her hair, giving her kisses.) We met our host (his private riad, it would seem), then sat down ten to a table (snowy white tablecloths and napkins, gold chairs with red velvet cushions) beneath the dizzyingly detailed painted ceiling, surrounded by zelije tiling (“that intricate mosaic tiling using hand-cut tiles,” nod to TimeOut Marrakech) and various cushioned banquettes and even deeper couches reaching back into arched alcoves that made me feel a lot like curling up and going to sleep. Already on the table were small fancy plates of hard-boiled eggs, dishes of salt sharing space with a half-moon of ground cumin, dates, dried figs, tiny sweet pastries of sesame, honey and fillo, and the same sticky brown coils of honey-sesame confection that we shared with Abdellah in his shop-front. This version, however, was slightly different: more molded, shaped, each individual coil separate from his brother rather than a single delicious crumbling tangle we all broke into.) Each place-setting included soup bowl stacked atop salad plate stacked atop two dinner-size plates. We sat, all of us, in appreciative stunned delight at the promise of such a meal. (Though I have to say, it was late—Hazel was tired, squirming, ever-curious, an unpredictable constantly-in-motion handful. Paul and I did not so much sit in appreciative stunned delight as breath-held hope that we’d make it through even to just one more course beyond this auspicious beginning.) From beyond the riad’s muffling walls (and maybe via the open sky above the courtyard), you could just hear the siren marking the end of the day’s fast. And so we began.

First the soup (harira—Paul said he liked Abdellah’s mother’s recipe better—this was saltier and had a hot bite). Then various cold salads—cooked eggplant, zucchini, green peppers, vinegary tomato and onion. Then a chicken tagine (two whole chickens), which arrived in an enormous conical silver-lidded dish and was placed in the center of the table—top removed with cinematic flourish. Then coffee (sweet, milked) or tea (mint—hot, very sweet) and then up to the roof for cold drinks. As we ascended the narrow twisting staircase, you could glimpse into rooms to right and left—a parlor that looked a lot like something out of the turn of the last century: covered fireplace decorated in green tile, chandelier-style wall sconces against warm yellow plastered walls, great potted palms, wing-back chairs arranged in conversation; and above to the left just before arriving outside, a bed chamber up a couple steps from the ante-room featuring an elaborate wood-carved headboard framing a deep-orange bedspread gracefully reaching the floor. Once on the roof, Hazel made a bee-line for the cushions arranged on two sides of a deep-piled white wool rug, pillows also leaning against the wall, flopped, rolled, sat up, lay down, drank with both hands holding her glass of fresh orange juice, watched the older girls leaping from one set of cushions to another, then was satisfied (for a while) lolling in my lap or looking at the moon from my arms. The rooftop interval lasted just long enough for me to briefly wish we could stay on without Hazel to look after.

We managed to make it through to the lamb cooked with raisins mounded atop a heaping portion of couscous (again presented in an enormous tagine-style silver-lidded dish), the couscous fortress buttressed all around by thick-cut sections of carrot. But the tide had shifted. Hazel was done. Two others with small kids simultaneously hit the wall and we all bowed out as trays piled high with oranges, bananas and grapes were paraded in. Off we went. Leading us into the night and along the same route we’d taken in was a riad staff member dressed in white; and then we were back at the mouth of the Medina, moving into a sea of people exiting La Koutoubia, salmon swimming against the stream. One of the Moroccan teachers had offered us a ride; and as we followed his lead across the square beneath the mosque, weaving among families and men walking together in groups of twos and threes, again, this feeling of not-from-here. But even despite this foreign-ness (the outfits, the language, a religion full of ritual and meaning with which I am not familiar, all of the incomprehensible signifiers of culture), the scene felt a lot like the mayhem that follows a football game.

I was thinking of the days of old in Hudson, Ohio and the high school football team that would play on Friday nights in the stadium at the end of our dead-end street. The up-late-ness of it (when I was first allowed to actually go to a game), the perpetual mystery of big-kid culture, the night sky beyond the towering lights, the pressing crowds streaming out the gates on the way home. We folded ourselves and the two (by-now-asleep) girls into his car, inched out into the hordes—crowds of people and cars, scooters, buses, all heading away from La Koutoubia. In a truly cinematic moment, we passed (well, crawled) by a fight on the sidewalk at the center of a swaying knot of young men—shoving, shouting, arms raised—and was that a white-cuffed policeman that just shot by on his scooter? Unaccountably avoiding it all. Paul points out a trio of women, arms linked, in varying degrees of religious observance—one in kaftan and no head scarf, one in headscarf and skinny jeans, one in a short sundress, all (I think) Moroccan.

Just this morning on the bus to school a Moroccan woman sitting beside me (no headscarf) said this is the first wife of the king of Morocco that the public has been able to see, that she is highly educated, she works, that the king’s ideas are modern, he is open. And at the end of the day, as it happened, Hazel and I stumbled into the king’s path—crowd-control blockades lining Mohammed V, khaki-clad white-spatted military guards with their stiff backs to the emptying streets, policemen out in full force and then, all of a sudden, two screaming Sureté National cars go zipping by—men sitting outside of shops get up off their chairs, pedestrians turn toward the curb, everyone looking up the avenue. Then a phalanx of motorcycle police on bikes right off the showroom floor zoom past and almost before I can turn back from following them, and in the blink of an eye, five or six black tinted Mercedes sedans—all at about 50 mph—are gone before I can tell what happened. A jubilant shout here and there, arms upraised. The young man next to me smiles when I ask, “C’est tout?” That’s it?! He grins again and Hazel and I turn toward home, feeling jubilant somehow, having witnessed this galvanizing public moment. (Paul later tells me that he’d heard the king was going to visit the local jail, to inspect conditions there.) 

I’ve been thinking not only about feeling foreign here but also about being female, in this Moslem kingdom, in this city that last June elected its first ever woman mayor (and the second only in Morocco), a city that proudly boasts plenty of women driving scooters—a novelty elsewhere in Morocco but a reality here since about the mid-1980s (this last fact from a native of Marrakech, someone Paul met through school). But here I sit on our couch at home while Hazel naps and Paul spends his day out in the world. I’m at school in the morning with Hazel (hanging out in the library, planning on volunteering there, tutoring writing and maybe college-essay crafting? —huh), but divorced from all the familiar outlets at home (and I don’t mean shopping). It’s an odd and un-moored feeling. Suspended between west and east in some way, defining for myself the imperatives of each, buying vegetables for tonight’s dinner.

This is not very much of anything at all in comparison to the lives I’m reading about in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran—in Nafisi’s narrative, these women lead lives circumscribed in ways I can only imagine through someone else’s telling, where they fight to keep a grasp on the private territory of their own imaginations. 

Take a chance on me (thanks to Paul, with a nod to ABBA)

In a silly sort of way, we had to psyche ourselves up to go back into the souks. We went yesterday. There's just a certain sort of discomfort not knowing what exactly people mean, what exactly their intentions, not wanting to offend but also wanting to move with your own desire as guide, not bob along on the variable current of whatever comes your way. So we were prepared to do what we'd come to do: a friend had given me the address of a rug dealer she knows and our intent was to visit him. We walked from our place—a good 25 minutes along sun-baked and busy mid-morning avenues, stroller navigating around this mound of gravel, that car parked on the tiled sidewalk (all these obstacles that take on, if you let them, a very different aspect only because they're Moroccan, not because they're any different from home), doing our best to make like the Marrakechis and dash among the traffic—and arrived at the walled Medina at a different entrance than we'd done so previously (avoiding completely the yawning maw of the Jemaa El Fna). Through one of the several arched openings we found ourselves exactly where Paul thought the map said we'd be—at Rue Bab Doukala, one of the many narrow points of entry into the craze of narrower streets dizzily knotting themselves together. At the corner where a scooter repair shop buzzes amidst the bustle, all of a sudden there's someone at Paul's elbow asking where we want to go and telling us, Oh no, you want to go that way, that way—and urging, insisting us on down the street, gesturing to the inside curve of the city wall, away from the street we're (pretty?) sure is where (now we think?) we want to go. Hmm. Not wanting to offend, wanting to take his kindly advice, off we go, already veering away from what we thought the trail was going to be. We waive off a second offer of direction and advice, this from a petite mustached man in bright blue, and keep on.

We’ve made our right turn now into the souks, passed the pungent stacks of bundled mint and parsley to right and left, the mounds of zucchinis and green peppers and pyramids of purple-skinned onions, the hanging carcasses of meat and one particularly fresh looking pile of what looked a lot like several hundred lamb chops—plunged into it. Again, out of nowhere (and everywhere?) appears a man in a white polo short, maybe late 50s, walking alongside me, striking up a conversation—how did it begin? Was it Hazel in her stroller? We talk of there being a unity in all of humanity, that Moslem, Christian, Jewish, we are all the same, there is but one god, and before I know it I've fumbled around in my bag for the rug-dealer's address (scrawled on a torn-out college-ruled notebook sheet in my American-school-girl hand—so conscious that my numerals and letters just do not look like the European-influenced hand here), shown it to him, and told this gentleman about our search. Now he's turning us left down an empty street, narrower still, not at all crowded, and we're into a residential quarter of the old city. He's telling me his brother works in the souks and so he knows that this particular rug-dealer has just opened up a larger store, maybe three years ago, that it's just on the other side. Kids play here and there in the streets and doorways and arched entryways of courtyards; we pass even narrower alleyways, and the omnipresent but only occasional scooter zips by but not-so-fast. He's talking politics: about how the riads, these old dwellings in the old city that date back to the 17^th century, have been sold to foreigners by the children of the older Marrakechi families—sold to make money, of course—and that the king of Morocco has now forbade such sales to foreigners. I’d just seen a magazine cover picturing Mohammed VI and his son dressed in traditional Moroccan garb above the caption (in French): The Modern Face of Tradition. (Paul found on-line a consortium of Moroccan political blogs that reported several publications had been pulled from Moroccan newsstands for running a story on the King’s popularity rating: 91%. They were pulled because you just don’t rate the king. His popularity is not an issue. He is the king. Period.) We're zigzagging through a maze of cobbled streets, beneath underpasses held aloft high above by smooth-worn beams in the cool gloom, how could I find this same way again? And then we’re out into the blinding sun. Our impromptu guide leaves us at the mouth of the neighborhood, points down a curve of exhaust-choked street, and says, It’s that way, ask anyone, they’ll tell you, and promptly disappears.

When I again pull out the address and ask first one, then another man sitting in front of another shop, one in particular—after poring over my scrawl and also a map that he retrieves from inside, and then checking with his friend—laughs warmly and says, “We are sons of Marrakech and even we haven’t heard of this address!” Foiled again.

Paul notices a bowl. That’s how we stop. “Zwin, zwin,” Paul says to the lean gentleman in the doorway—“Beautiful, beautiful” (then, as I type this, he adds, “one of the few words I know”). Abdellah Kharbibi and his son are in his wood shop, the warmly polished inlaid bowls hang on both sides of his open doorway and he works in the narrow shop’s entrance. Paul is admiring an intricately worked ebony and lemonwood and cedar bowl—and then Abdellah, with a lathe that he powers with his right hand (he uses a bow), braces his work against his naked feet and with his left uses a chisel to make Hazel a small cylindrical oleander-wood pendant that includes a tiny ring wrought from the same piece of wood. He quickly buffs the curved end, uses an awl to work a hole through the other end (he brandishes the awl with a smile and says, “Berber Black & Decker!”), fishes out from a multi-colored tangle a length of henna-brown cord, cuts it with another tool, threads it through the tiny hole, knots it and gently puts it over Hazel’s head—this all in about 45 seconds. “Ca porte du bonheur,” he says—that brings happiness, good luck. His son, maybe 10 or 11, then makes one for me in the same manner and it takes maybe a minute. I’m not sure now how it happened or in what order, but before we’d bought a thing he was inviting us to return at 7:00 and break the fast with him, join him for harira, the soup that during Ramadan you begin the evening’s meals with. “It’s a recipe from my mother, my wife makes it—delicious!” he says. In my hesitating way, I pause and say Oh, Paul starts his work tomorrow, the school year begins, not tonight.

What?!! Why aren’t you just saying yes—immediately—to this incredibly kind and generous offer?!!? Paul looks at me, really? Why don’t we go?

It’s actually been more than a few days since this all transpired—blogging could be a full-time job if you don’t have a 2-year old (and probably is for some who do) and you don’t like to sleep. At any rate, we did go—how could we not?—made sure to get there early, returning exactly the way we’d made our way out of the souks that afternoon. Hazel asleep in the stroller—this time, on the way out, we met for the second time the very same petite mustached man in bright blue; he fell into step with us, then ushered us out of the Medina—though we knew we knew exactly where we were—pointed out the direction of a particular mosque, a well-known fountain, and asked for some money in order to eat, helped us over the broken stone of one of the smaller arched openings in the old city wall, disappeared—then reappeared a moment later (probably once he saw that we were paused on the edge) to help us wade out into the relentless traffic to cross the first street beyond the wall.

We returned to the shop through cooling streets in time to see people hurrying, hurrying to make it to wherever they were going to break the fast, to feel the streets begin to empty, then to watch as shop-workers brought trays of harira to each other, hard-cooked eggs and little papers of salt, fresh-squeezed orange juice, coils of sticky sesame-and-honey confection. We sat in the entrance of Abdellah’s shop, Hazel on a tiny-tiny stool he’d brought out from the back of his shop for her, paused with everyone—at seven o’clock exactly—to listen to the muezzin’s call from a small mosque around the corner, and then began to eat. (The soup was thick, made with tomatoes and chickpeas, onions, rice, ginger and saffron—delicious.) The whole scene—to be of it but also in it, to have been invited to share the evening’s first meal, to watch this man with glasses alternately on his nose and perched on his head sitting outside his shop on the cobbles, having given his seat to Paul, smoking away on his Winstons (in the month of Ramadan you can’t smoke during the day)—the entirety of it was overwhelming. The sky deepened, Hazel pointed out a star, and soon the waxing moon rose above the roof-line opposite the shop. Abdellah asked again, nodding, really you’ll be here the whole year?—and invited us to come back, to meet his family (my wife could do henna for you, he’d said when I showed him my embarrassed hand), and we gave him our address. Time to go—Hazel is the clock. We said our thanks, which seemed exceptionally paltry in exchange for such generosity, said that we’d come again, as he’d insisted we should whenever in the souks, then wheeled Hazel out into the night. It was good to walk the half hour home, to move through the dark and think and wonder about the evening. (Hazel ran most of the way once we left the Medina, incidentally, wound circles around us, literally, weaving among the arcades along Mohammed V.)

In the few days since the evening with Abdellah and in the process of writing, I’ve been thinking a lot about memory—seeing the Medina in all its overwhelming, over-stuffed, over-abundant glory as metaphor, as memory itself: what if you could walk through your own teeming gallery of memories and, leaning out at you, asking you if you need directions, would be your confident ten-year old self, or Teddy Clements who moved off your old street when you were five and have never seen since, or there for sale your favorite plaid skirt from third grade? I’m thinking about relentless time, relentlessly unspooling, each second wedded to his brothers on either side—in contrast to the unhinging and illogical, unkempt and disordered tangle of what has been. Even the writing of it all down just jangles it a particular way, never as clear as the way it must have happened. 

Blue in the Red City

We went a couple days ago to the Jardin Majorelle, an oasis of cool blues and greens hidden away from the dusty red city on the other side of a surrounding wall. Once upon a time (in 1923) the French painter Jacques Majorelle came to Morocco, settled in Marrakech to convalesce from tuberculosis, and built himself a villa surrounded by gardens and pools, decorating its various features in a color he coined Majorelle Blue—an intense lapis-cobalt-just-at-deepest-dusk hue. Here and there throughout town in front of shops and cafés you see plants in pots of that same vibrant blue. (The color reminds me of the evening sky in a Maxfield Parrish painting called Hilltop Farm, Winter.) Marrakech, incidentally, is called the Red City because so many of its buildings, new and old, are either painted this deep ochre color or built from the earth on which the city is founded—and the earth here is red. We saw a huge back hoe the other day gouging out enormous mouthfuls of rust-red earth from a narrow lot while a crowd of us watched, intent as Hazel on the carefully articulating "mah-sheen." The French, while in power early in the last century, laid down an ordinance that mandated all new buildings follow this already-established color scheme. Yves Saint Laurent eventually bought the Majorelle villa and gardens and studio, and the gardens continue to be open to the public. 

So we walked the 20 minutes from our apartment—paid our 60Dhs and, backing away from the sellers of silver baubles and leather belts, slipped through the door and past the first fountain in blue and green tile (though Hazel went back and back to it before we could move on), fell into the cool bamboo and palm shade, listened to the running water, and generally disappeared from the hot afternoon on the other side of the wall. Red brick and polished red concrete walkways pull you through the arching green, make you pause at the side of lily pools to look down at carp and turtles (who gather beneath you looking up for food—it's a heavily traffic'd tourist destination), invite you to sit, breath, be still—or caper about through sun and shadow if you're 2. Because of the cool blue and water-green, maybe because of the YSL connection the place draws a healthy crowd—we heard by turns Italian, German, French spoken by Belgians and French (we talked to one such couple) and others not of European descent, and British English spoken by a couple with their four blond kids in tow. On the streets, in the souks, in the gardens, there are plenty of people from elsewhere here, but perhaps especially in the holiday month of August, even despite the fact that this year Ramadan straddles both August and September.

Before we made it into the garden, I'd told the guy trying to sell me a silver necklace that what he held in his hand was beautiful indeed, but maybe later, not now. And an hour and a half later as we left, there he was, offering, asking, showing, pleading as we walked the 50 yards back out to the main thoroughfare. "My wife at home, please, Madame, 50 Dirhams, 40, 30—20," he said finally. $3.50 for a silver-studded necklace of turquoise and jet-black beads? Who knows who made the necklace, what the materials or value really. He was slight, dressed in dusty pants and jacket, his face browned and wrinkled beneath the curled brim of hat. He wasn't smiling or jibing with humor. "My wife at home," he repeated, tilting his head to one side. When it was clear the three of us with Hazel (in her expensive British-made stroller) had no intention of being persuaded, he turned away not with disdain exactly—was it resignation? or a mixture of disgust and disappointment?

There's a great disparity here between people who have money and those who don't. I saw an older woman curled up sleeping on the street the other day as we walked back along Mohammed V. She lay on her side on a length of cardboard at the base of one of the columns of the arcade there, hands palm-to-palm beneath her head, grey hair close-cropped but matted, her knees tucked up, naked and dirty cracked feet together, dressed in filthy white shirt and colorless pants. I saw another woman again this morning while Hazel and I were out for a walk, tall, dressed in the same tan pants and navy blue jacket, the same zip-bag over her shoulder, greasy henna'd hair bunched in the same way at the nape of her neck, hand out-stretched, palm up as she moved against the main flow of pedestrian traffic. There's a crippled man we saw again today too who sits at the base of another column further along the avenue—he smiled broadly just as he had the other day, "Ca va, madame?" he asked just as before. By contrast, the towering glass-walled stretch of the Spanish Zara store, also along Mohammed V, contains 2,000 Dirham duvet covers and pewter pitchers for 229 Dirhams, approximately $250 and $30, respectively—and spanking white Mercedes and flashy BMW roadsters tool about the city among the donkey-drawn carts, the many teams of horse-and-carriage, the endlessly dodging scooters. Again, a disparity not unlike any other city, right? 

Yes, and no. All I manage to see right now is the uneasy relationship between a French colonial past, a further past of Arab influence, and a past beyond the past of Berber independence. (In general, the Berber term for themselves is Imazighen, the "free people.") Maybe this story of the powerful and the powerless is universal, especially now that industrialized nations stretch their long and indiscriminate arms virtually anywhere on the globe. And white as we are, walking along the streets, it feels like we are perceived only as the face of that double-edged global reach—maybe only as an immediate source of potential gain. I'm reading Beryl Markham's West With the Night, her 1942 chronicle of British East Africa in the 19-teens and '20s. The writing is lyrical in an old-fashioned sense, her descriptions lovely, her turns of finely wrought phrase and her use of metaphor a pleasure. But she is also of her time; she writes of one of her dearest Nandi (native Kenyan) employees and friends that he would touch a horse "with animal respect for animal dignity." But what am I asking of her? Maybe Markham's frame of reference, the way she sees black and white—sensitive and thoughtful as she is—has poisoned, or over-sensitized, how I'm able to see the world around us now in 2009. So I find myself anticipating real conversations with people who are from here who could counter some of these post-colonialist preoccupations of mine.

The Majorelle garden, this beautiful island of rippling blue calm, is a product both of the European fascination with the exotic and its supposed dominion of it—or at least ownership. First the Frenchman Jacques Majorelle, then his countryman Yves Saint Laurent, then the rest of us. Beautiful, blue, even so.

We go it alone

OK. So it happened again. The being had. Please witness photo (to right) as evidence of the Mark of the Tourist. I only found out later from the 6th generation Berber Herbalist that the "henna" the woman used was not henna at all but chemicals and lord knows what else. He showed me a box of black hair dye in contrast to the natural henna product and explained that tourists wanted something darker than the soft brown of the natural henna tattoos, something that would last, something closer to the "real" tattoos of home. So the hawkers on Place Jemaa El Fna (and elsewhere, presumably) started using this black stuff that's probably not unlike L'Oréal No. 389, Black Beauty. Anyway. There is the lovely smudge on my right hand for however many months to come, marking me out as the idiot tourist who in a moment both maternal and inattentive picked up her 2-year old and ruined not only said 2-year old's lovely flutter-cap-sleeved white shirt but also the henna-job.

So this is how it happened. We wanted to go into the Medina, the old walled city and the warren of souks, the shops selling all sorts of goods—arranged, for the most part, by trade, and laid out for the most part in the shade. We took our petit taxi for not-very-much all the way up Mohammed V, one of the main arteries of the city ("Oh, les filles!" cried the driver as a slow-moving sedan, driven by a woman, inched its way across our path), getting out beneath La Koutoubia (as I've mentioned, the landmark of Marrakech, the 11th century mosque built by the Almohads to mark their defeat of the Almoravids). The plaza, awash in morning sun and enormous in its expanse, was relatively empty in comparison to the packed feel of the teeming crowds swirling beneath the night sky last week. I dropped a couple post cards into one of the yellow post boxes arranged by twos in front of the packed post office, classic tourist move, then we turned to make our way, without Moustafa, toward the entrance to the souks along Rue Souk Smarine on the far side of the plaza. And before you could say Jack Robinson (as my mother would say), they were upon us—the snake charmer, wrapping a snake around my neck (we, the snake and I, locked eyes for a fleeting moment, six inches from each other's snouts) and rubbing the body of the snake on my arm for good luck, the man with the blond-furred monkey in his arms, pushing Paul to take a picture of Hazel and me and the monkey, and then the woman with a long syringe pulling at my hand and squirting the beginning loops and dots and curls of her design onto the back of my trapped hand. I'm looking at Paul, Hazel is with him, I have the stroller, but not my wits. 

I get caught in these moments where I want, dutifully, to do what people expect of me, to agree or nod or affirm in some way—impulses borne of years of being taught not only to get along but to connect with people, to be kind by default, to make others feel at home or ok. However. It's hard to do this when you don't really speak the language, can't expertly navigate the intricacies of human interaction, let alone traverse the trickier passages of culture—and want to exit tactfully and without offense. So the various pliers of this and that fell away (I was falling all over myself, turning to right and left saying "Non, merci. Merci quand meme. Desolee. Pas aujourd'hui") with the single and persistent exception of the woman speaking to me from beneath the black flutter of veil that covered the lower half of her face. She had me by the hand and was not letting go, had already made her mark and was going to see some money for having done so. Which is only natural. Paul had read the guidebooks (or was taught from a young age to be mean, he just said), and was standing well outside the forcefield looking in at me. In my flustered state I fished around first in my wallet, then in Paul's change purse and gave the woman what amounted to $0.75—"Bonne chance, madame," she said in what sounded a lot like disgust and was turning away before I could say—what? "A vous, aussie"? What do you say? Ach. Only the satisfaction of writing it all down (and taking a picture).

Then into the souks, all that you imagine but alive (this time we saw 15-foot hammered double brass doors, mountain ranges of sticky honeyed sweets, inlaid wooden trays and octagonal tables by the dozens and dozens)—and amidst the overwhelming abundance, found a pair of orange leather sequined slippers for Hazel, for which I paid way too much. Again, the learning curve of the person trained to be kind is steep here. Rashid, the proprietor or at least the frontman for the leather goods shop, has a brother who's an herbalist, and the family also has a silver-shop—come, let me show you, just around the corner. So we did go, but only to see the herbalist, leaving behind promises to come back again (we live here! and though I bear the mark of the idiot, we aren't like that!).

The herbalist was something else altogether—his shop, just around the corner in fact, a wonder of meticulously arranged heaps of clove, stacks of bundled cinnamon, jars and bottles and packets full of substances of every hue. It really felt like you imagine a film set might feel—things set at just this or that precise angle, colors a little brighter and sharper, the wooden painted sign outside almost from the props department of one of the Harry Potter films. (This is my point of reference.) At any rate, the herbalist (he seemed so young—was he owner or engine or what exactly?) made clear the difference between a pharmacie and his own shop—nothing chemical, tout naturel. He went through an entire spiel (that sounds pretty trite, he was warm, gracious, good at his job and good at making us feel welcome), assisted by a young woman in headscarf, expounding the wonders of argan oil (have you heard of this? an interesting substance, a magic elixir and cure-all, it would seem, only from Morocco I think, or at least the Sahara), dotting each of our arms in turn with first orange-oil, then rose-oil, demonstrating the proper technique for testing saffron, giving both Paul and me a good strong snuff of nigella seeds he'd rubbed warm (like Viks VapoRub, but packed with a much different and organically sharp pungent kick), and on and on about as long as Hazel could last. He also kindly explained the black gook on my hand, smiling ruefully (as it seemed to me). We bought some of the most intensely cinnamon-y cinnamon I've ever encountered and a couple other packets of spices—fenugreek and a typically Moroccan blend, said our thanks (received Hazel's gift of a curious tube of green lipstick than when applied turns pink—a big hit), returned by way of Rashid (paused to converse), then had Hazel asleep on my shoulder before we'd left the shade of the souks.  

[Footnote to an earlier post—the brass dog has disappeared, and it's not because I've shopped early for Hazel's Christmas stocking.]

Meditation on size and space

We have a Hobbit-size washing machine just outside the kitchen on the closed-in balcony (and no dryer—it turns out that sopping laundry, at 107 degrees Fahrenheit, will dry stiff as a board in about an hour), the chilled milk is sold in petite pints, so too the orange juice—but the spices, the olives, even the supermarket variety are all sold out of gigantic bins that put Whole Foods and other expensive US purveyors of taste to shame. We bought a giant tub of capers because that's how they come (and they are pungent little suckers for sure, somehow more gamey than their tiny cousins packed in slender bottles that make it into the States), but the ice cream cone that Hazel managed mostly on her own was quite modest in comparison to the giant scoops from Kimball's Farm in Littleton, Massachusetts (as big as your head, no joke) that we devoured without batting an American eye. Granted, Hazel's boule the other day cost $0.75, but still. The circumference of a roll of toilet paper here does not rival that of a mature deciduous tree (and does not come in 24-paks for x-tra val-u) and the supermarket itself could fit seven times over inside the local Acme back in Hudson, Ohio. And yet—the gracious tiled courtyard outside our apartment window, the huge Jardin El Harti around the corner full of olive, locust, palm and fig trees, abundant and gorgeous blooming red-orange lantana and periwinkle plumbago, the parade of public fountains that she played in, the wide boulevard outside the main train station (itself a grand sweep of tile and canopy). 


We visited the campus of the American School of Marrakech for the first time this morning. It sits outside the city a ways, not too far, maybe a 15-minute drive from our apartment. Our place is in La Guéliz, the quarter built in the 1920s when Morocco was a Protectorate—so it's the part of town with office buildings that (in scale) would feel at home in downtown Cleveland, say, apartment buildings done by English developers, facades on a Western scale. Heading roughly southeast, rounding a series of traffic circles, we gradually left the city (Moustafa at one point swung wide out into on-coming traffic to pull around a little slow-moving truck), skirting the old walls of the city, passing La Palmeraie (a centuries-old palm grove now increasingly nibbled at by developers)—while out the window flashed the modern facades of unfinished single-family homes and condos sitting empty in the morning sun. We turned onto a stretch of narrow road and passed a herd of shorn sheep and a lone donkey and lean-limbed dogs in the dust outside a group of single-storey low-to-the-ground houses massed together. We zipped by the Atlas Golf Resort (big colorful billboard), also unfinished—you get the sense that the city is creeping closer, but that it may take another decade to reach the school's gate. Which there is—a closed wooden gate, a guard (several in fact) and then a long stretch of green, the gracefully arching roofline, cool outdoor hallways and covered staircases still wet from a morning wash. There are orange trees, those tall pines with small close branches that together form a single column, beds of roses, rows of nodding miscanthus, olive trees, green grass. What a vision. It's a beautiful space. Both of us breathed in the moving air, the vista beyond the school's grounds, felt grateful to be at home where there's a place for Hazel to run. "Take off shoes," she nodded, sitting down on the stone step, pulling off both crocs, setting out into the grass and fluttering up two grey moths that were settled there. 


So back in the apartment, snuggled up against strangers like you are in a city, walled away from open green spaces,  I'm remembering the two weeks we spent at my folks' place—Hazel went outside before bed to say goodnight to the fireflies and the garden, she splooshed water from the wading pool onto the waiting tricycle, ran out across the neighbor's yard totally naked save for her bonnet (diminutive pioneer sprite). It's an adjustment that has to happen in my head—recalibrating home space, public space, setting aside the old ease of access to outdoor space that's "ours." Recalibrating proportion of all sorts. 

Jemaa El Fna

Wednesday night, August 19, and we’re sitting on the couch in our apartment. Paul pops open a Flag Pils, at $1.60 a can, and we realize this is Hazel’s first day in Marrakech not having eaten an ow-ow (that’s olive). And so we tumble back into last night’s trip to Jemaa El Fna—a plaza that sits almost in the shadow of the city’s landmark mosque, La Koutoubia—an outing fueled mostly by a big bag of olives that keeps Hazel alive into the night:


She looks out the Citroen window from my lap as Moustafa, the school’s driver, takes us to Place Jemaa El Fna; she’s watching the horse-drawn carriages going by us to right and left, “Gallopa-gallopa-gallopa,” she says, and then wonders where the horses go. “So many people,” she says.


The people are pouring out from wherever they have been during the day, into the gathering evening and the streets, scooters zing by on both sides, one with a baby sandwiched between the driver in front and the scarf-clad woman on the back (her scarf hangs down and covers the scooter’s brake-light, the baby looks back over her shoulder); above us strung every so often across the boulevard are arabesques of white lights, getting brighter as evening descends. Everyone beneath them on sidewalk and street are weaving this incredible tapestry of movement and energy, people watching and pausing to cross at just the right moment, go and more go. Moustafa noses the car around a large traffic island where a woman in a lace headscarf poses for a picture beside a cannon (she looks and nods at what her friend has taken), and a Caucasian couple stands with backpacks and front packs each facing the other but looking out around over each other's shoulders at the swirling scooters and cars and the standing traffic police in their blue and darker blue and white holsters and extended white cuffs. Given the couple's expressions, wide-eyed and dazed, I wonder where they’ll find to stay tonight. An older woman—small, swathed in long tan dress and scarf, hesitates, gauging the flow, then steps out from the island into the moving tide of people and cars—one of those faces in a flash and then gone. Mouad, a young Moroccan teacher at the school, had said to us the day before as we walked out to buy groceries that people just cross the street as they can, wherever, “That’s how it’s done here.” Bryan, head of school, was with us on that excursion and said that in Vietnam he was instructed to just keep his tempo steady as he plunged into the stream of bikes and scooters and cars, that everyone else will adjust as you move along, and you’re safe only as long as you keep your chosen pace.


By the time we’re dropped off to meet Bryan and his family and Moustafa returns from having parked the car who-knows-where, it’s dark. The group now includes Vladimir, the new history teacher, and his wife Natalia, their 5-year old son Niki, Bryan and his wife Cha-cha (she’ll be Hazel’s Montessori teacher, already “Mizth Thca-thca”), and their high school senior son. Moustafa, now our guide, snaps shut his cell phone, leans down to kiss Hazel, takes her hand, I take her other—and there she is walking bravely between us toward the great bank of lights illuminating the blowing curtains of smoke from the cooking fires of the food stalls at the center of Jemaa El Fna. There is a sea of people between us and the lights and the smoke—all beneath the great bowl of the dark sky. Her little face is flushed, her dress swinging, and once she spots the single star you can see right above us here, she’s singing her version of “Star light, star bright.”


And it’s a crazy scene. We stop first to watch one of the many monkeys with handlers—this one is in a purple pleated dress (her handler gestures to us to pet the coarse, grey, oddly abundant fur of her forearm), she does several back flips when vigorously prodded, and then lays herself coyly back on the cobblestones, on her side, tail curled just so. Endless sellers, mostly teens or children it seems, hocking this or that drum, bouncy-sparkle toy, single packet of tissues, wooden but undulating snake, move through the throng (no live snakes after 6PM, however, much to Hazel’s dismay). We drink fresh-squeezed orange juice from one of the dozens of juice stalls—Moustafa chooses one, for what reason I’m not sure and neither of us recalls which number (the stalls are each numbered, but not lined up chronologically), and I wish I spoke enough Arabic to know what he is bantering about with the juicers up behind the counters, probably a good three feet above us. He gestures, he laughs, they joke—clearly part of the culture of choosing one but not leaving the others out. At one point he leads us off the plaza and into the twisting streets of the souk—shop upon shop, leather goods, pottery, silver, clothing, and then the olives—great glistening pyramids, pale, black, green, spiced. We buy a bag (Moustafa, since he is here, enacts the exchange)—and we’re good to go for at least another hour. We have a late supper at one of the food stalls (be prepared to say no to each emcee at each stall until you reach the one you want—one says to us, smiling, encouraging, pegging us in a heartbeat, “Fingehr leekin ghood!” ). And then it’s home through the streets still thronged with people, lights still lit, the guards at the King’s Marrakech residence chatting in their booth, home to bath and bed. 

Little brass dog on the sidewalk

Yesterday we went for an evening stroll out our door and down the block. We crossed the first street and walked by the shop with the small brass dog that sits on its haunches and holds open the door beside the group of men who always sit in their rattan chairs, chatting and passing the time. Hazel plops down to pet the patient creature, and soon we're in the shop, shaking hands with the proprietor Abdul, accepting his offer of mineral water, looking at pictures of him with his arm around clients in LA whose homes he's decorated (Samuel L. Jackson, Lawrence Fishburne), watching one of his men ask Hazel which necklace she'd like to have from the great painted bowl of necklaces conveniently situated at her feet, looking at each other when he says what size rug do you want to buy, or do you like which mirror? Here are some beautiful mirrors (he speaks low and fast to his assistants and snaps fingers for them to bring down mirrors in sizes I might like), we can send anything to anywhere, no problem (he lived in La Jolla he says, and Florida). He speaks a mixture of French and English to us, always gracious, but also pushing, pushing, and then even better price since you live down the block and don't need to send anything to the States. Here are pictures of my two girls, my wife, he pulls them out of his wallet and we watch as he offers Hazel a view of his smiling 8-month old. Good prices here -- this henna'd camel-bone mosaic bound mirror? Other shops? in the Medina? much more expensive -- here, 300Dh.


And just like that we find ourselves folded into Abdul's car, being zoomed (as it turned out just around the corner) to his vaster emporium of North African wares -- he pulls up, stops with a jerk, I just catch Hazel as she lurches forward almost off my lap. We're ushered down a hallway lined with silver decanters and trays gleaming from behind glass, then into a high-ceilinged room, leather bags and purses and sacks of all sorts stretching up to the rafters, other clients sitting with empty tea glasses and crumpled napkins, slipper upon curled slipper stacked on shelves, elephants of all sizes and brass camels parading along the floors, more mirrors bound in silver and bone and silver tea pots and glass tea cups all tucked into alcoves to right and left along the main aisle, then finally rug stacked upon colorful rug and lining all four walls of the the great room at the back, this one lit by the sun still stretching long dusty shafts through a high bank of windows. We are whisked and urged and cajoled and petted by a series of sellers, while shop-assistants, who must still be in their teens, unsnap and spread on the tiled floor kilim after lovely kilim. Pour vous, moins cher -- bien sur, un prix spécial. For you, 20% off our normal prices. Hazel chases the elephants and Paul wrangles Hazel while I look first at the deep red and bright orange tapis and then that deep blue one with the red fringe (dyed using indigo, the gentleman says) then another more beautiful than the last, before we thank all concerned as profusely as we can manage, say how beautiful the wares, really and truly, walk empty-handed down back through the leaning towers of goods and down the glass and wood hallway, and finally spit ourselves back out onto the cooling tile of the sidewalk, wondering what just happened.


I guess we look like we have the money, the look of an obvious and quick sell. Anyway. Paul said later that when he was Hazel-chasing, Abdul asked him if we were buying anything and when Paul said he thought not, he took off down the aisle towards the exit. We walked by again today (Hazel got down on her knees to say hello to the dog and give him some water from her sippy-cup) and the kinder, less hustle-hustle assistant said hello and asked if we'd bought anything the day before -- no-no, we live here, we'll take our time... so maybe that's how it goes the first time around when you look like we do in this place.

Apartment, for the first time

Paul said yesterday that he's never lived in an apartment building, and so one of my first thoughts after we'd walked through our apartment's wide front door for the first time (the kind of door with the European-style non-turning handle placed squarely in the middle instead of connected to the lock-and-bolt gizmo off to the side) -- first thought peering out our fourth-floor window into the courtyard below was a moment from Hitchcock's Rear Window -- the one you think of too, probably: Jimmy Stewart rolled up to the nighttime window (we see what he sees across the way and down below), Grace Kelly sneaking from room to room just as the nefarious villains return. No chance of burying a body in our courtyard, though -- it's all stone tile from stem to stern, no hiding anywhere, unless you can manage, Keystone-Cops style, to make your tip-toe way from one potted plant to the next all the 50-meter length of one side or the other of the echoing courtyard.


I stood down there this morning talking with Jihane, a young woman who works in the building -- I'd seen her before in our comings and goings over these last couple days, she'd cooed at Hazel and said bonjour before, but this time she pulled out her phone and took a picture, two of them even, kissed her, said thank-you. And so this will be Hazel's experience in Morocco -- already has been -- kisses a-plenty and more inside each rug shop, around every corner, from old and young. Of course the guide books predict all this, but it was shocking when the Royal Air Maroc attendant at JFK swooped down to Hazel's 2-foot level, whooshed her with a pinch and a twinkle and a ruffle of her blonde head, and then sent us into the warren of glass-walled hallways that wound us eventually down to our plane. So we managed, Jihane and I, between French and English and a few words of Darija (Moroccan Arabic), to learn each other's names, to exchange telephone numbers, and to promise Darija lessons in exchange for English. It has been (predictably) completley frustrating not knowing how to say exactly what I mean and with the right inflection and intention. It's a handicap that's hard to manage sometimes -- I was thinking no wonder people come to a new place and recreate the old, or even sequester themselves from the surrounding and incomprehensible culture.


Two nights ago just after dusk it rained a booming thunderstorm (frustrating not to be able to get access easily to the sky to see it coming), and so we dashed from window to window and finally down into the slippery courtyard (where in fact two men were moving along one side from potted plant to potted plant -- taking slight shelter under the slim eaves 40 meters above). After only a few seconds amidst the drops Hazel slipped once, caught her balance, then was headed back up the stairs. We watched the rest of the storm from the living room in the dark, windows closed since the temperature I'm sure was still in the 90s. And so here again was a Jimmy Stewart moment -- there was the big-boobed lady two floors down reclining relaxedly with her naked-torso'd male companion on a bed right underneath their window, and the place across the way with the gorgeous carved wooden panels and the huge lantern and the tv that seems to have been on all day and still is, and another naked torso'd guy with a woman and their kid, all three leaning out into the courtyard and the rain. From this apartment we hear people doing what people do at home in a way we never did in Berkeley in our little duplex, never on the sheep farm in Groton, not ever really anywhere else we've lived. Duh. This is city-living just like in any other city for sure, but here it's another part of the new.


[A literary post-script: I did in fact read Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky -- and found that it was true to its post-WWII era in attitude and content, that it had bleak things to say about our ability to communicate with one another and across cultures, that it viewed the Arab as "The Arab," full of mystery and romance and the Exotic, that the East is an inscrutable screen on which to project Western desire -- so the book is of it's own time and I'm happy that it's not mine. I heard that the late Paul Bowles was a great friend of the late founder of the American School of Marrakech -- characters maybe from a lost time of expats abroad. I'm curious about that expat culture here now, post-September 11, 2001 and in the era of Obama. So far no t-shirt sightings.]

In the city

So now we really are here, despite the subtitle up above. Because I'm-not-sure-why, it takes a thousand years to switch from one screen to another, from one "I want to post now" to another "now it's time to add peeps to my list of who can read me" -- so apologies beforehand for whatever the final version reads or looks like to you -- it will take a bit of doing to get what's in my head or on my camera onto the screen. The computer part is mostly a mystery to me anyway, made all the more so by the Moroccan air through which these signals and blips are moving. World Wide Interweb, indeed.


I've written a bunch already on my own laptop, but so far Maroc Telecom won't let me onto our wireless configuration at home, so I'm hunched over Paul's laptop while both of us sit here on the black leather banquette, drinking Flag Pils and glorying in the fact that the girl has gone to bed, we have wireless, we skyped with Paul's folks and with mine this evening, and the dust of the first 72 hours is settling, albeit haphazardly and in fits and starts. (The sudden thunderstorm last night at 7:00 made some dust settle, I'm sure -- Hazel came running down the hall from the back of the apartment into the living room shouting, "It's raining! It's raining!" in her way -- and sure enough, great ropes of water were tumbling down and then the boom and flicker and clouds above us moving swiftly, the green fan of a palm on the roof of our building bobbing away in the wind. Still it must have been in the 90s. It's hot here.)


It's amazing how the old life falls away (the Cheeseboard, the baths at home, the trips to the park with her pals and mine and the patch of grass that Hazel liked best to run in) -- not really of course, but the present is so consuming, with its green tiles and sandaled feet, the smells of piss and incense, the toothsome grin of the gentleman across the street from whom I bought a head of cauliflower, 3 zuccinis, 1 red onion, 3 tomatoes, 3 oranges, 1 bunch of parsley and 1 free banana for Hazel all for $2 -- these things, faces, new corners and smells leap up in the now.


So this is the first post here -- we are here. We did make it out of Casablanca (only after the two hour layover turned into five -- there's a strike at Royal Air Maroc and we were lucky even to make it out that day), and though we don't all of us have wireless right now, at least one of us does, Hazel has been sleeping beautifully and generally marching through her days with joy, we have each other, and so the year begins.