Marrakech Mischief

Hazel threw up all over our new rug. So even though Abderrahman had said to bring it back if it doesn't completely please (“People have brought rugs back from France!”), I think we’re keeping this one. I was alone with her at home (this was last Tuesday October 6), it was after her nap, and she calmly stepped away from the couch and onto the rug to be sick. I think it was a shock to her—first time her body had done this particular involuntary thing to her, though she seemed to take it all in stride (and then stepped in it). Over the next two hours she threw up another six times—nothing is more anxiety producing than to be with your sick child, partner is away, and no phone. Paul wasn’t due back for another hour and half, and when he did walk thought he door, the battle was well lost. My sponge couldn’t keep pace with Hazel’s tummy. I’d tried to clean the rug with fair to middling results (the colors began to bleed), but I was opting for clean over color. I got her in the tub and was washing the rug in the sink beside her, trying to manage both concerns (it’s a beautiful rug!). This worked until she was ready to get out, get dressed, sit back on the couch—and then start the cycle over again. Umm—wash, rinse, repeat? With Paul back (bringing with him the single mobile phone that works—note to self: activate the other one we brought), I called another American from the school (she’s been here eight years and is married to a Moroccan). Her recommendation was to go directly to the pediatrician. I made the mistake of calling the office first and was met with a surly and thoroughly unhelpful receptionist who wanted, at 5:45, to go home. I explain the situation, tout en francais, comme il faut—my French is not bad—and yet:

Receptionist: Flat, without affect. Unconcerned. Oh, you can come in tomorrow morning.

Me: Raging silent disbelief for a split-second. My daughter just threw up five times in the last hour and half—and you can’t help me?!

Receptionist: No.

Me: Barely containing myself but doing an admirable job, all things considered. Do you have any recommendations for where to go?!

Receptionist: Non. Au-revoir.

I was gobsmacked, as my friend Sravani says. I could not, could not believe that that’s what this woman had just said to me. Come in tomorrow?!! I was in tears (pointless angry ones) punching the tiny ‘off’ button on the mobile phone. Where’s a clunky rotary phone with its dead-weight receiver when you really need to slam the phone down? We ended up taking Hazel to a local private clinic and emergency room where—eventually—she was seen by a Paris-trained Moroccan pediatrician, all brisk efficiency, no-nonsense shushing when Hazel wailed at the shot in her bum. We’d waited a good twenty-five minutes in the incredibly high-ceilinged examination room, blinking around at the bright unrelentingly white, watching each other and Hazel and a couple black bugs on the white tile floor. Before that we'd waited at the buzzing front desk. I was nudged ahead in line by a really nice young woman after several people had just stepped up in front of me—clearly I am here with my sick daughter!!—but it was every patient for themselves. It's the same thing at the little grocery store across the street. No patient lines, just assertion. So the woman behind me, in gentle tones but insistent, pushed me on ahead and we got seen.

By then it was dark outside the barred windows of the examination room and the florescent lights only added to the general nausea. We hadn’t brought our phone, couldn’t remember the number when the nurse asked us for it as she’s entering Hazel into her graph-paper logbook. The weird name, the awkward address (no one seems to have heard of our street—but then, why should they have?), the taking of all this information without a phone number seemed to be an exercise in futility. Anyway. The two triage nurses (tiny, slim, both scarved—they just seemed so young—does this mean I'm turning 37 this month?)—they both leave and we wait, and wait, and wait. Hazel throws up again. By this time we’ve had enough time to really begin to panic, to feel disconnected, maybe even to be lost in the system. And it’s happened to me before! In New York City once (late afternoon, busy, a community clinic off Union Square), I waited for what seemed like hours in the airless examination room before I finally poked my head outside the door—Oh! There’s someone in there! I got a startled look from a nurse, and then the doctor came. They had forgotten me. So I step out into the hallway with Hazel on my hip (now in her last clean outfit), and walk, gingerly at first—but dammit, my girl just threw up for the umpteenth time! down a ways and peek into the next open door—one of the two nurses talks on the phone. She looks up at me, puts down the phone, slightly annoyed—“She just threw up again,” I’m trying to convey a meaning and urgency that maybe my French alone cannot convey. “Le docteur n’est pas encore la? Soyez patiente, madame.” The doctor’s not here yet? Be patient, ma’am. And she turns unmoved back to her phone.

It all works out. Time exhales once the doctor arrives and Hazel, aside from the few tears shed when receiving the shot, was brave throughout—and seems fairly unimpressed by the whole episode. She takes sickness like Paul does, with a minimum of fuss and not much energy squandered on the drama. We pay (320 Dhs, about $40), go around the corner with our prescription to one of the dozens of pharmacies, one to a block almost—get our three different potions for about $10 and then we’re home. (I find it interesting that on their prescription pads, doctors here advertise where they received their degree. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that in the States.) Hazel throws up the several huge gulps of briney water she has rushed down, she eats a bit, she (slowly!) drinks some more, then she is—to our great relief—asleep.

It turns out that the doctor is an aunt of one of Paul’s students. “I heard you saw my aunt last night,” he says to Paul the next day at school. “Short hair,” the kids says, further identifying her. The doctor did have close-cropped hair. It must take a certain amount of strength here to wear yourself differently like that. It’s the same kid whose uncle owns the artisinat around the corner where I bought Hazel’s pouf, and whose other uncle famously kidnapped us to go buy rugs at his glorious emporium. Marrakech, it turns out, is a small town.

Another small-town moment. We ran into Abderrahman on our Saturday morning walk to get groceries (see photos, previous post). Paul had said let’s go a different way, off the exhaust-clogged Yacoub el-Mansour, and so we followed our noses and the map, and just as I was dashing across the street to check out this language institute we stumbled upon (courses on offer in Arabic and English), Paul runs into Abderrahman on his way to pick up two of his daughters from their English lessons at the very same place. He of course knows the gentleman who runs the institute, in fact knew his father thirty years before when he first came to Morocco. We talk and laugh in the morning sun and sheer lovely happenstance of it, and tell the tale of the rug and Hazel. He says to bring in the rug, that he’ll clean it using a combination of sulfur and water and shampoo, sulfur to keep the color true.

24 hours after Hazel felt it, I did too (I was really sick—something is going around), Paul felt horrible 24 hours after that, and then felt better and now, for the last 24 hours, again horrible. We went to a doctor this morning—a German woman who the same American friend had recommended—she’s been here for years and years, has quite a good reputation and speaks English, good for Paul. “She’s very German,” says Paul as we’re walking away from the appointment. Dr. Michaelis had called me in at the end of the visit as she wrote out Paul’s prescription. Her manner, just like the pediatrician, is efficient, a bit gruff, but clear and firm. She scolds Paul for sitting up before she has given him leave to do so, tut-tuts at Hazel as she reaches out and touches the speculum which sits on a cart at Hazel's waist-level (EEK! There will be time enough for those later)—“Good thing she didn’t touch the other end,” the doctor says, not altogether grimly—there is humor there, a little anyway. But Paul has been sick for longer now than ever before, or for as long as he can remember. It is unnerving in a foreign place to be at the mercy of the mystery of your own body and of the medical culture at large. I think this same situation is true at home as well—but the familiar elides some of the uncertainty and smoothes over, at least in part, that yawning chasm of the unknown.

In the waiting room this morning a woman in full chador, clearly in some distress, had enough energy to smile warmly at Hazel, receive Hazel’s offering of several goldfish crackers, give her a kiss and a wave—many times over, while Paul lay on the couch. And then later a woman with a baby and an older girl and her husband came in—we talk, as you do over the heads of your children. She is an art teacher from Agadir (nearby), invited us to call her before we come to the city if we happen to be traveling there. And last night (before round-two of Marrakech Mischief descended on Paul) we happened into a really lovely conversation with a trio of men sitting outside a café. We’d gone out for pizza at a place we’d seen, again on the Saturday walk, and were tootling back through the dusk at Hazel’s pace. This means climbing up on café chairs one after the next, stopping to hide behind the telephone pole (“I’m hiding!” she shouts with glee), and generally taking an interest in her toes and the sand pile and the sky and the concrete wall all at once. This older guy, cane leaning on a nearby chair, calls out almost sharply, “Elle est mignonne, cette fille!” gesturing to Hazel, and moments later Paul is speaking in English to one of his neighbors, the man is maybe Paul’s age—they’re talking about the state of education in Morocco and the States, and I’m talking with a third guy about the tourist industry and travel in general (“There are tourists who travel with their eyes shut—these should stay home. Others travel with curiosity.”) I am generally terrible at recounting conversations verbatim and wish I had an NPR-issued tape recorder to catch even half of the remarkable conversations we’ve had with people. These moments bloom out of sheer proximity, eye contact, out of Hazel’s being the insouciant age she is. The man who spoke English (he teaches in an International Baccalaureate program outside of Marrakech) used one expression in particular that I’m now struggling to remember—how is it these gems slip by? It’ll come. Meanwhile, Marrakech Mischief still lives at our house. It’s about time for Hazel’s nap to be done, to look in on Paul. (And I have to credit my friend Martha for coining the term—her version is “intestinal mischief”—IM for short. The Marrakech version is a doozie.)

Photos from our morning walk

Here Hazel has decided to plop down and take off her shoes, but Paul persuades her otherwise:

I'd seen this furniture gallery (called African Lodge) a couple weeks ago while Hazel and I were tootling about—and was struck by this take on Ingres' famed La Grande Odalisque (1814). A couple more versions of the same image in different shades also hang in the gallery's window—thanks, Mr. Warhol. I just thought it was pretty interesting to see a western painter's famous image from the "exotic east'" re-made and re-produced multiple times over (albeit through westerner Warhol's lens) right here in the "east." (Note that she's missing an eye—another play on seeing, or not.) Didn't stop in to ask about the artist, Moroccan or French or who exactly, but either way a cool reinterpretation. Hazel and Paul wait patiently across the street...also pictured, a bicycle wheel reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp and his "readymade" art, circa 1913:

Hazel finds another seat—she tries all four of them in fact, though I took a photo only of the first:

You see 4X4 vehicles of all sorts all over town, typically advertising tours of some sort. None quite so disturbing as this find:

One of the many homeless hounds of Marrakech. Paul just now tells me (when I ask what he would say above this photo) that it's been about two months since he's pet a dog, and that if we stay here he's going to open a dog shelter and spaying service. This is a typical sight:

Blooms and telephone lines, city shot:

Saturday trip to Asni

The road to Asni leaves Marrakech directly south via an explosion of tourist-construction—water-parks, hotels, golf courses—the sort of thing built with government money that the locals can’t afford. Abderrahman confirms this. He picks us up at 8:30 sharp, his smiling daughter Safia in the back seat; we pause briefly around the corner for patisseries and then we’re off, the mountains ahead of us. Once we’re safely past the stretches of billboard proclaiming the pleasures to come, grazing goats and sheep take over, (once two Holsteins), and around the next corner at rest in the shade near a large dark brown tent two saddled camels, their jaws working, long-lashed eyes slowly blinking. Tiny pockets of habitation here and there zip past in a flash—old walls which look like they’re made from a mixture of mud and straw and crushed limestone called pisé, all the building-materials the same shade of ochre that most of Marrakech wears. This is the plain between Marrakech and the Atlas.


Because I’m in the backseat, I only see later why we’re pulled over. Two blue-capped policemen now stand beside the car with a speed-gun. Abderrahman leans over to the glovebox, pulls out his papers, gets out and then talks amicably with the two men for what seems like quite a while—long enough that we can hear the radar beeping and discreetly keening as one of the policemen continues to zap the oncoming traffic. Safia takes down the back windshield’s sunscreen so she can get a good look at her dad in his negotiations. When he finally gets back in, Abderrahman reports how he pleaded his case. “I have friends on the plainclothes force who have specifically told me that you can travel at 10% over the speed limit without a problem—66kph, for example. These guys were telling me, Oh, no—not true, only 63, 64.” However the moment resolves itself, no ticket (as far as I could tell).


The morning is hazy and so the mountains are only indistinctly south—we’re in them before you can tell exactly what’s happened. Always impossible to both see where you are and claim any perspective on the bigger picture. The road narrows as we climb—we pass really close to a serious cyclist on a real road bike, not serious enough to wear a helmet, just the little old-school cap favored by the spindly 1940s Tour de France riders. Sheer pinkish walls of vegetation-less rock climb to our right while down to our left the river meanders across its wide rocky bed. Drivers are not shy about hugging bumpers here, and one does—Paul (who was in the front seat) reminds me that it was a tiny Coke truck (“tiny” by American standards) who rode right on our backside a good ways up into the mountains before the guy swung perilously out into oncoming traffic, around us and back into our lane. We stop once at a bend in the river to get out and stretch—a small town (I think it must have been Moulay Brahim) snuggling up to the cliff-face on one side, looking out at the river on the other. Saddled horses, mules and several camels drink below in the shallows. Another thirty minutes of climbing, valleys every now and again offering up views of far-away minarets lifting out of the rock and green, and we’re into the 10AM bustle of Asni on its only market day of the week.


As we pull into town a guy with a huge freshly butchered haunch resting easily on his shoulder (goat? sheep? something bigger I’m sure) crosses in front of us. We pull into a narrow spot right off the road, avoiding people to left and right, and we’re into the dusty day. First stop, across the way and through the arched opening in the wall for tea and talk with a long-time friend of Abderrahman’s. He greets two men who are sitting behind a table and ground-cloth laden with teapots and trays and necklaces for sale—these things look old, but I haven’t been in Morocco long enough to know without asking the probable provenance of such items, or their age. We take off our shoes and take seats on several rugs spread out on a tarp beyond the table. We cozy into the shade of more rugs hung on a line to one side. “The same place I took our friends!” Abderrahman smiles and gestures. He’s shown us pictures of our friends from back home sitting in this very spot, in the very same bright light. Hazel right away asks for tea, is giddy at the prospect, delighted when it arrives. She promptly spills some onto the tarp and it runs downhill toward the seated gentleman who’s poured it—I find myself awkwardly not mopping up almost under his ankles and toward his seat. These miniscule moments of gendered awareness. The talk is all in Arabic—Abderrahman and his friend of twenty-five years are catching up, and again, though Paul catches more and more of it, it’s like our trips to Germany where language is my precluding factor. Hazel finishes her tea and sets about putting on Safia’s shoes. Safia, for her part, gamely entertains, though they share no common language. Tea over, Hazel wandering further and further off the tarp and rugs, it’s time for a tour of the market.


Amidst the canopied fruit and vegetable stands and in the shade of the (non-native) eucalyptus trees, the mounds of onion and potato, carrot, tomato, eggplant, the mountains of yellow melons and piles of grapes, olives, socks are for sale and car radios, plastic toys (what exactly?), shoes and shoes, school notebooks lined in the French graph-paper style, kaftans and djellabas—everything people need for the week, Abderrahman says. A donkey goes trotting by and Abderrahman lifts Safia onto its back for several paces through the crowd, then Hazel. Though in the moment she looks uncertainly back at me after only a couple trots and says, “I want mama!” her little brow deeply furrowed, that night when she’s in her crib and we are talking in the semi-darkness about the day, she scrunches up her nose, eyes smiling, kicks her feet, draws her hands to her mouth and says as best she can through all that movement, “Donkey!” and laughs. Then with a nod at Paul, Abderrahman says to me, “Tell him I’m going to show him the Mercedes parking lot!”


Before we get there, we’re waylaid by our own inability to say no—that and the persuasive salesmanship of the practiced. I think initially we thought that Abderrahman knew the guys selling djellabahs and scarves, babouches (leather slippers) jewelry and silver boxes. Not so. We pay too much (“I didn’t think you wanted to buy anything!” Abderrahman says later—“We didn’t, but we just always get…”) and my explanation is swept away in the general momentum, the heat, the desire for more tea—and probably my not finding le mot juste in French.


“Look at all these restaurants!” Abderrahman says with a smile—his manner both wry and affectionate all at once. He’s pointing down a long row of low buildings that borders the market on one side, each one with a single window and door, all of them selling food out the front, all of them offering seating beyond, dimly, inside. He chooses one and gives the cook at the front the mint and sugar he’s just bought. (See the sugar in my hand somewhere to the right—sold in white blocks—the seller breaks off however much you want; Paul reminds me that he used a bicycle crank to do so. Hazel was happy to taste. Another side note: diabetes is rampant here, sugar intake pretty fierce. It’s not only the tiny Coca-Cola truck’s cargo that’s to blame.)


The two light sources inside the low-ceilinged room are the open shop-front and the single barred window at the back. The space is maybe 13 feet wide and 30 feet deep. We take off our shoes at the edge of a checkerboard of woven mats at the back, and sit near an older man already seated at a low table with his back to the window. “There’s the Mercedes parking lot!” Abderrahman says with a wide grin. “Look out the window.” Below the barred window standing on the river’s flat shoulders, dozens of donkeys with feedbags munch in the sun, tethered and waiting. Moments later an insistent braying floats up from outside (isn’t it ridiculous that my point of reference for this sound is the actor playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?! “Oh, how lifelike those actors have been!” I’m thinking to myself. Wow. OK. Culture-girl has day at country market and is beset by reality.)—so there’s the braying and Paul turns to Abderrahman, gesturing out the window, “The cars are warming up right now!”


Lentils arrive and bread, and we all share across the low table. Then tea (Hazel squeals with delight as it’s delivered: see picture above, sugar-fiend in full pleasure) then we’re back outside, headed down the lane with open-air food stalls on one side and the restaurant-fronts on the other. Fish sizzles in hot oil at several of the stalls, while at one window Abderrahman asks permission to lift the lid off one of a row of tagines set atop braziers on the window-ledge—so Paul can see and smell what’s inside. We had only snacked—next time, lunch. Around the corner of the long low-slung length of eateries, we’re walking downhill along a narrow mud-filled alley to the parking lot—to see what turns out to be not just dozens but maybe hundreds of burrows, all talking and laughing with one another. It’s their only day of rest, says Abderrahman, the only day they’re not at work in the fields. From this vantage point we can see the piles of apples that have been dumped in the river. Orchards hug the riverbanks—apple and pomegranate, apricot, peach. And looking back now, we can see the restaurants from behind—see that we ate on the second story. Abderrahman had said the river crests in flood time at a wall where some of the burrows munch—the wall, though a good twenty yards off the back end of the buildings, looks to me (worrier) like it may not always do the job.


We loop back into the market via the humming donkey-shoe stalls (“Changing the tires!” jokes Abderrahman) and then he asks us if we want to see the meat market. I don’t think I expected anything else, but still, we are so protected in the States from the realities of butchering, the industry by design so cloistered. Here, I’m sure a US Health Inspector would have had a field day, or been properly schooled. Goat heads all looking in the same direction (necks bloody) cover a ground-cloth, lined up one after the other, perhaps three rows of ten each, eyes fixed but with a live look. I’m embarrassed to recall that I asked Abderrahman, “What do people use the goat heads for?” Eating! silly Shakespeare girl. Odd to think how vibrantly aware he would have been of life in this way, the son of a glove-maker—animal life in his time of course used in all of its multitudinous indispensable ways, the reality of which you’d be hard-pressed to escape. Several nearby stalls had already sold part of their stock, only a few goat heads left on the ground looking less ordered and more like scattered carnage. Huge pale haunches are slung over tables or hang from stalls, dark red and white ribbed slabs wait to be sectioned, piles of stomachs (sheep? goat?) turned inside out lie in pale crenellated stacks on the central tables, the entire market arranged in a horseshoe-shaped path of choices to left and right. It will all be sold by the end of the day, says Abderrahman.


The obligatory bag of olives is bought to quiet a tired Hazel while Abderrahman buys fruit and vegetables. (Why didn’t we do the same? I guess because we buy all of our green groceries from the stand across the street from our apartment—even so, thinking about it now, we were apart.) And then we’re back into the car for the quicker trip home. Safia falls asleep curled on the backseat, Hazel naps wakefully on my shoulder. (She’s inherited my sleep-gene, not Paul’s.) Abderrahman invites us back for tea at his shop later in the afternoon and we happily accept—lovely post-script.

Three-towel world

I’ve been stuck on that phrase—“living in a three-towel world.” Hardly. We live a really comfortable life here. We eat well, we don’t worry about money or rent or how to clothe Hazel, we have many more things, and a lot more security than so many in this city—and elsewhere. Luxury abounds. I have time to write. “A full stomach and the head can sing,” Abdellah reminded me a little over a week ago when Hazel and I went to visit him in his shop. He had first said this when we went back that evening during Ramadan to break the fast—sitting on the floor of his shop drawing comfortably on his cigarette after the meal, his long thin hands gesturing to fit his words. And as Hazel and I sat again in his small shop-front, it came back to me that I didn’t remember exactly what he’d said: “Encore une fois, quelle est la connection entre l’estomac et la tête?” I asked. “L’estomac plein fait chanter la tête,” he replied, his own, I thought then, no longer empty during daylight. Paul was saying the other day that there is nothing comparable in our own culture, nothing so totally daily-life-altering built into the arc of a year, whether religious or secular. What social imperative in the States demands that we remind ourselves that so many others survive on so much less? That there are other things to contemplate besides the crush of the immediate and the incessant of the every-day? I found myself wondering what the homeless do during Ramadan (they are everywhere here, and I see the same people on the same streets again and again, day after day, night after night)—what structures are in place to attend to people in need? The Koran requires that all good Muslims give to charity (and mandates too that all people must have access to clean water), and Ramadan specifically demands that people give to the poor, the hungry, those who otherwise could not afford to buy new clothes for their children on the occasion of Eid el-Fitr. In another trip to the souks this week, Hazel and I had stopped to talk to a rug dealer (he sat in a comfortable chair in the shade in front of a large shop overlooking the tiny plaza that is the spice souk)—during the course of our ten-minute conversation, several people came up, not saying much, and from a sack beside him he would take out a round loaf of bread and hand it out. “I give to the poor,” he said.

We met a friend of our friends back in the States last Sunday, and we spoke together in his tiny rug shop amidst the smell of wool and the tea things on the floor—round tray, well-used tea pot (filled with both mint and rosemary—a new combination for us), several clear glasses. This time we found him. Though the self-professed “sons of Marrakech” from a month ago (Take a Chance on Me, September 4) couldn’t tell us where to find this particular address and claimed never to have heard of it, all we needed to do was go to the rug souk and ask someone. Which we finally did. The guy we asked (the same one Hazel and I spoke to again this week, with the sack of bread) took me alone first to make sure it was the right man he was thinking of. “Beard, right?” air-stroking his chin with one hand. “Glasses? OK. Follow me.” He lead me through a narrow opening between several rugs hanging in the sun into the deep shade of a covered street, went this way and then that. And the friend's shop was empty. “Wait just a minute—I’ll be back.” How did he know where to look if he didn’t even know the man in the first place? Here is where (again, the refrain), if I spoke Arabic I am certain there would be delightful clarity instead of general mystification, or at least I could ask in a way that’s different from the French. (He was watching a football game—soccer, that is.) The guy who’d escorted me now returned with the very friend our friends back home had urged us to find; introductions all around  (“I’ll come back with my husband and daughter—two minutes!”). Back I came with Paul and Hazel—almost didn’t make that last dog-leg jog to the left to find the shop tucked away along a narrow side-street off the main covered rug souk. We spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening in Abderrahman Bidda's shop, La Petite Boutique du Tapis.


Incidentally, the entrance to the carpet souk is off a small plaza where even into the twentieth century slaves were auctioned. It’s a revelation to pass out of the maze and press and crush of covered streets, shop after crowded shop, and find yourself looking out across an open space that feels human in scale, not nearly the overwhelming and grand sweep that is Jemaa El Fna, and up at the refreshing bowl of sky. This place feels intimate. In the middle of the plaza the sellers of baskets and woven hats sit facing the foot traffic; they’re surrounded by a café, spice-shops lined up one after the other (turtles and other reptiles stacked in cages out front), the odd spill-over rug shop.

I keep thinking about the slip of sky that you see from Abderrahman's shop, sitting with your back against the southwest wall and looking out through the wide gap between the roof-line of the jewelry shop opposite and the covering that reaches back across the narrow street, how that space is like a stretch of carpet itself, shifting in color as the light changes. Twice now we’ve gone in in the full heat and brass-bright of the afternoon and come out into the dusk, into the dark—having watched (sporadically) that slice of sky shift from blue or cloud-drifted, to lavender, to mauve, to no-more-discernable-sun. The color-quality reminds me of certain flavors of Necco wafers (those confectioners’ sugar-dusted discs of chalk-like sweet that come in a wax-paper roll)—the lavender, the chocolate, the black licorice.


For the moment, I’m going to skip the most interesting part of the weekend (a trip with Abderrahman and his daughter to Asni, almost due-south of Marrakech, to the Saturday Berber market there), and briefly recount the acquisition of a rug. Saturday had been a long day (so many rows of severed goat heads arranged on the ground, their eyes open, dozens of undersea-looking sponge-like flaccid structures lying limp in piles on the edges of tables—just now Paul tells me they were stomachs, turned inside out, the people and people and people doing what they do every week)—and after the trip we'd been invited back to the rug shop for tea, a relaxing end to the adventure. So despite the day and the waning light it seemed like a good moment to buy a rug for our echoing home (“Our apartment is like a cave,” Paul said). In a moment the shop  filled up with unfolded rugs, one kilim after the next. Riotous profusion—red and darker red, saffron, orange, threads of green, the geometry of each one different from the last.  An ecstasy of rugs: Hazel was leaping and rolling in the color like a girl possessed—we tossed her at one point like you see people do, each of us holding a corner of the carpet. The colors exploded off the shelves—the same synesthete thing as the taste of Hazel’s strawberry gelato later that evening as we strolled home, leaping at me in a full-on assault of pink tang-zap sweet. Impossible to choose, but we do, head home.


There’s part of me that can’t stop thinking about the tetrus-like arrangement of all our things back in the Oakland attic: books and books and books, Christmas decorations, napkins and tablecloths and backpacks flattened to fit into huge plastic tubs, clothes and more clothes, crates of Ikea organizers and wooden hangers, Hazel’s heavy box of toys, the two shallow plastic tubs—heavier than you’d think—full of sheets, and those last half-dozen boxes of crap that marry the glom of fridge magnets with the Guatemalan basket of desk-detritus with the masking tape and the dust bin and the final tangle of extension cords and the last three sharpie markers that marked all the endless boxes including the one they’re now inside. So I’m thinking of our own abundance in contrast to the self-professed lifestyle curates in Marrakech—there are plenty of people here who advertise that they’ll be your personal shopper, people who amass beautiful things and help you do the same. Are we so different?

What’s in your pouf?

A week and two days into it I decided to take Hazel out of the 5-morning a week Montessori program she was in, mostly because I missed her too much. The ordeal of getting out the door to meet the faculty/staff bus at 7:15 (and not being able to count on a ride home at noon when her day ended, instead having to wait til the bus left at 4:30), not getting a real nap but instead napping the sweaty sleep of the upright stroller—all of it was too much on top of not wanting to miss the daily dramas of a two-year old—not just any two-year old, mine. I say “I” and “mine” because ultimately it was my own horror at her tears and lamentations (I know that these will happen again whenever it is we decide it’s time for school), my own sense of clutching-at-nothing looking out from the faculty-room balcony onto the pre-schoolers’ playground and seeing her fetch a tiny plastic stool, set it beside one of the teachers and climb up. (I felt a little like a voyeur, having stolen away from my book in the library to spy on my daughter, but even so—she’s only 2, and I want to be the one she sets her stool beside.) And ultimately, it’s my time with her, all day now. She is Paul’s too, of course, but during daylight weekday hours I’m the primary wiper of noses and bottoms, fixer of snacks and lunches, companion on walks and trips to the store, translator of almost-incoherent this’s and that’s, and I’m the one who gets an island of calm of variable size when she crashes in her daytime crib. So here we are, partners in time with plenty of places to explore.

But it’s daunting. It’s the maternal grandmother in me, Anna Louise, who loved her couch and her Sunday Times, her kitchen, her garden of daffodils and cosmos, her home. (She was not a great traveler, much as she loved the trip to Greece they took, the trip to England, the trip to see Shakespeare performed, professionally, in Canada.) It’s the part of me that doesn’t speak Arabic yet, the part of me that’s self-conscious about standing out—blonde, female—in this city, despite its vast population of Westerners and the hordes of shorts-and-halter European tourists, despite the fact that my fellow explorer is the object of disarmingly abundant affection from all corners. (This morning she received an invitation to have tea later in the day from one of the guys who shared tea with us on the street this past Sunday, a trio of chocolates from a guy who sells cigarettes out of a suitcase around the corner, many Bonjours! Ça vas? and countless kisses from at least a half-dozen other groups of people over the course of our two-hour ramble this morning.) It’s the part of me that misses the things that packed themselves into our old life, the blue plates and the rug from our wedding, the stacks of sheets and towels in the hall linen closet (at home, the bed didn’t stand naked and the towel rack empty for ten daylight hours while the sheets and towels air-dried), the army of glasses in the kitchen cupboard, the pictures in frames, the fireplace waiting for fall. (That’s a lot of stuff, especially now that we’re living in a pared-down three-towel world.) It’s the part of me that misses the constellation of friends and neighbors back in Berkeley, the part that wonders what, really, we’re doing here. Not getting paid to work is part of it. And of course, none of these feelings is particularly new or revolutionary, or unheard of. They’re just mine, in this particular place, right now, in my own particular chronology of experience. It has been a little over two years since I was in the classroom, plugged into a community with its own rhythms, imperatives, culture—and now this year, a third year “at home” where most of the familiar is packed away in my cousin’s attic in Oakland. Honestly, the writing in this “spacebook” (to quote a friend’s husband), odd as it is—blog to my ear when I first heard the word sounded sort of stupid, and, well, here I am eating crow—odd as this medium is, hybrid of some version of public, and an interior voice that’s more at home between the covers of a journal—it is satisfying to set notions down, render a scene that was striking, and thus both make room for the next and leave a trail of breadcrumbs for someone else (Hazel in some future-now?) to follow.

So I wished I had my camera this morning. Twice. Hazel and I climbed up the several deep steps of a large C-shaped concrete amphitheater that sits outside the Jnane El Harti, and there in foot-high black spray-paint letters was “FUCK THE POLICE,” in English. The words were scrawled on the inside wall at one end of the amphitheater. Hazel had climbed up and run along the top step to reach that end. There she stopped—beside the fervent declaration—in white sundress and pink crocs looking happily down at me out from under her pink and white flowered sunhat. Lovely contrast. Then, almost as if I’d conjured them out of my own sense of irony (irony, really?) one for each word, a trio of very young-looking policemen walked by in newly minted uniforms, blue hats set just so, slim shoulder to slim shoulder: first just their heads traveling left to right, bobbing along together above the rim of the amphitheater approaching the words, then walking further into my field of vision and beyond the wall of words—each of their bodies finding one word to move above, crossing the sunny plaza away from us and toward the enormous fountain, a moving invitation, refutation, juxtaposition at the very least.

A long time ago the summer before I left for my senior year of high school in faraway France, I found a scrap of Elizabeth Bishop quoted in a New Yorker article, the subject of which is long-forgotten if I ever even knew, or ever bothered to read it start to finish. I poached what resonated and left the rest. Bishop writes, “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?/ Where should we be today?/ Is it right to be watching strangers in a play/ in this strangest of theaters?/ What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life/ in our bodies, we are determined to rush/ to see the sun the other way around?” The lines are from a book called Questions of Travel, from a poem called “Second Thoughts”—and I have kept these words (or a version of them since I never took the time to commit them to memory) tucked into some corner of consciousness always since then. The questions persist. In college maybe and certainly in graduate school and I know in my own classroom I’ve encountered or presented this poem again and again. But even so, I’d forgotten that the poem answers its own questions—beautifully, specifically, with all the precision, clarity, and illumination that attended-to language can contain. I won’t bother you with a rehash of the witnessed moments she plucks to do so, but even more interesting, in the last two lines Bishop offers another question, itself an answer: “Should we have stayed at home,/ wherever that may be?” [italics hers]. I love that the first part of the poem’s last sentence is written in the conditional and in past tense (and echoes the earlier central idea), while the second part is solidly in the present. (Need to check the grammatical correctness of the tenses I’ve named here, but even so.) I read the line this way: home is in the present, home is where you are, home is a state of mind and place of thought, a decision you make about wherever you find yourself. And are we ever “home”? Also, this final question concludes her last two stanzas, both italicized—they are quotations (the poet announces) from a traveler’s notebook. So she answers her questions with words themselves written somewhere along the way, away from “home,” written in the full flush of lived (and almost simultaneously reflected upon) experience. You really need to read the poem in its own context, or simply on its own. I’ve struggled all my school-life with having the patience to read poetry. So here I am, close-reading one and picking away, explicating it, when of course the real power of language is in your own solitary devouring.

So I’m imagining what people put in their poufs here. This because Hazel and I bought one the other day, a pretty petite deep red pouf for her bedroom—brought it home where I then looked around at our bare space, casting about for what soft but sturdy material we could stuff in there to fill it out and make it do its job. Ce n’est pas evident, as the French say, with no good translation. (“It is not obvious” doesn’t quite do the idiom justice.) We’d gone to this artisinat around the corner precisely because you don’t bargain, you don’t haggle, you don’t counter-offer. You just pay the already-marked reasonable amount and don’t feel bad for having done so. We three had gone last week sometime, happy to look and not feel the press of the sell, and fell into conversation with the gentleman who was ringing us up (we bought a salad bowl! now we have one!). It turns out his cousin’s son is a student of Paul’s, and it was another cousin around the corner who on one of our first days here popped us in his car and stole us away in order that we buy stuff from him—the same guy who used to have the brass dog in front of his shop, as I mentioned earlier, now gone, the same one who calls out hello and how are you and, one other time just recently, How many rugs was it that you wanted to buy? So the gentleman who eventually rung us up was the one I’d earlier asked, when we first came into the shop, “What do you put in a pouf?” Poufs seem always to be displayed sunken, propped on a shelf, a little sad-looking, or stacked, all their potential imagined. It was one of those moments where, could I have asked my question in English, I would have felt like I was conveying my notion as artfully and as wryly as I’d wished: funny even, kidding but really quite serious. As it was, he answered very seriously at first, well, you put in this or that—and then, dammit, my French still needs polishing. He did say something really funny, chuckled and turned away—did he just say you stuff it with all of your money? (Which is mildly tempting and slightly plausible given that Paul just got paid in cash for the first month’s work. If these keeps up, we’ll have to consider it.)

We go about making a more comfortable home. So far it’s two bowls (and a third one, a drab olive-colored ceramic mixing bowl that will stay here whenever we go back to the States). And Hazel’s empty red pouf. At night you can see across the courtyard into other people’s apartments and I found myself wondering what in fact people put in their poufs. From our (darkened) living room window you can see a couple of them in various apartments to left and right, up and down. Why was I surprised to see poufs in Moroccan people’s living rooms? I think it’s the exoticizing factor—poufs where I come from are a marker of the exotic, so why would they be at home anywhere, or everywhere? It’s all context. (Paul just said to me that the pouf’s in the pudding—and a good thing the pudding’s not in the pouf. Or that.)

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.