Fez Revisited [Personal Essay]

I.

The day starts with a call to prayer. On the edge of morning I lie awake; in the night we have cast aside our blankets, and now we are naked atop the bed, sweating, unmoving. Through the open window I can see the Merenid Tombs.

From here they look tiny, but I have stood at their base, I know their true size.

Beside me he sleeps soundly. He snores. In the morning I will tell him this and he will say, you snore too, you know. (No, I didn’t know.) It’s a conversation we’ve had a hundred times before. And never mind the grandeur of our surroundings, never mind that we’re in Africa, in Fez. We’ll have the same mundane moments we have everywhere else.

And then: this voice. Allahu Akbar. Breaking the dawn. Allahu Akbar. The first word drawn out, lonely. The intimacy is surprising; it’s as if it’s coming from inside the room. Then it’s joined by others; a chorus, off-kilter. The whole city sings. There are men in mosques right now bent in devotion to their God. And we sleep on, or pretend to sleep on, and eventually, just as the colour of the day is seeping into the horizon, the voices cease, and I dream of the way the Hymnus Eucharisticus rings out from the tower at Magdalen College on May morning.

II.

This is our city. I think this as morning clouds burn off and a waiter delivers my sweet mint tea to the rooftop terrace. It’s irrational and untrue. But just for a moment, watching the bustle below, smelling the white smoke wafting from a small nearby chimney, I am profoundly attached to Fez.

Three years ago we came to this same café and sat just as we sit today. He made a sketch of a lamp. It took him nearly two hours to complete; I mostly watched him, occasionally making notes of my own, envying his visual instinct; everything I recorded had to be in words, which are clumsy in a place like this, where beauty is paramount, where the sensual, not the cerebral, is what strikes you. We stayed for so long that the proprietor, smoking some kif in the corner, came over and offered us a puff. It was my first time in Africa; I did not know how to say no to anything. So we said shokran and then swam back to our hotel room through a haze of fauvist colours.

Three years ago we had just met. We were a month into our relationship. Our future – he being from Oxford, me being from California – seemed only a cloud through which we could not even imagine passing. But here, in a grubby hotel room in the medina, the exoticism was a catalyst, and we evolved from lovers into something else.

We held hands shyly as we explored; we learned the smell of each other’s sweat, the intimacy of shared anxieties and happinesses. We spent our days walking imperfect circles, coming across sudden palaces, half-decayed, women scrubbing the rot of orange blossoms from the zellij tiles. We never quite knew where we were and we never once felt lost.

Today the air is cooler. There are cats on the rooftop, mean, skinny strays moving towards us in a hungry phalanx. We can see the blues and greens of Bab Boujloud up close; earlier I learned that it was only built in 1913, though to my untrained eyes it looks older. Like it’s been here forever. Since the first call to prayer, the first dawn cracking like an egg over this city.

III.

It’s different this time.

We’re staying with friends. Ali is from Fez, Alice is from England. They live in a house in the medina that they bought together and renovated. Three years ago we had tea on the rooftop with them. The house was still nothing but a construction site; they were sleeping under a tarpaulin, heating their water on a cooking stove. Their dogs, Sophie and Bobby, sat at our feet as Ali showed us how to make mint tea. It was a windy evening and the dust got in our eyes and they tried to tell us how beautiful this would all be when it was done.

And now it is done; and it is beautiful, and in the tiled kitchen we prepare meals and eat olives, our fingers wet with juice, and stay up late. Alice introduces us to her friends – other expats, brothers-in-law, students at the school where she is learning classical Arabic. I remember that the city which I have thought of as ours is, in fact, theirs too; everybody has a Fez, a mental map of the medina based not on street names but experience.

But it is also different because three years of living together has made it so. We are no longer getting to know each other in such an active way. It is sometimes almost like travelling with myself. He knows, now, that I like to wash my hands more than strictly necessary, and I know without thinking about it that he will smoke almost twice as much here. There is nothing really to hide, or reveal.

And this is such a sweet thing, but also lonely – suddenly here we, this one thing that is a “we” but also an “I”, are, in a foreign country. Perhaps this is why I wake so often in the night here – for, in spite of him being beside me, smelling and feeling more familiar than anything, than even myself, I have a sense of being also alone. And perhaps also this is why people have children – I have this thought just before an afternoon nap one day: that at a certain point you become so close that you almost need someone else – who will be like him and like you but different and constantly, forever, surprising – again. Is that a strange thing to think? But then, everything is strange here.

IV.

Even the passing of time is strange here. I forget how quickly the medina eats away the hours of a day. First it is morning, and then suddenly we are looking at the stars again.

The sun has sunk. We’re all on the terrace, even the dogs, in raptures over the blessed coolness of the air. After everyone else has gone to bed I get my camera out and take some photographs of a minaret near the house, bright green in the moonlight. Even the darkness here is characterized by light. The religious symbolism of this does not entirely escape me – at a christening a few weeks ago, we were asked to help the baby walk always in light – but I find it difficult to articulate it precisely. It is like this: even at night the minarets seem to be illuminated, whether or not they actually are. The one near Ali and Alice’s house is abandoned and silent, but still it shines.

I don’t mean magic exactly. (Though at dinner, Ali tells us of the magic in Fez, and I cannot help but trust him – he’s from here, he knows, his confidence is contagious). I mean that we see the minarets, the city itself, bathed always in light, even at the cold hour of midnight. Awoken at five by the resounding calls to prayer, the day seems already to have begun, even if the sun has not yet lifted its hot, heavy self over the Eastern horizon. We are alone but not alone.