24.06.10. Fez, Morocco (Ali & Alice’s house, rooftop)

I.
True it is not the Africa of my dreams; but then, that place does not exist. It is not elsewhere, it is simply absent.

II.
The pigeons are making their guttural sounds; the wind is both strong and soothing, the sunlight casts a golden spell. Soon the sun will drop below the hillside – even now the sky at the horizon has turned pink. Behind me a minaret stands proud. Minarets and satellite dishes characterize the landscape here. I’m always so fascinated by these uncanny juxtapositions, but really they mean very little. This is simply how things are nowadays. There’s wifi in the medina; what of it?

This is a place that is both not-familiar and also very familiar; it moves quickly and slowly at the same time. From here it all looks so simple – I can see the Merinides hotel, the ruins on the ridge, and it hardly looks very far. A crow could be there and back long before the sun disappears. But below is a bowl of complexity; by foot it would take you an hour to find your way through the tangle of streets and shops and dead-end alleyways (”derbs”, I’ve learned they’re called, these exotic culs-de-sac). You would not be there in time for sunset. See? Simple but not simple.

III.
Oh, but it’s as Africa as any other bit of Africa. Its Arab influences do not preclude it from belonging to its own continent.

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26.06.10

Ali tells us of the jinns, the spirits. He does not like the dark because it is infused with them (and we arrive again at light and dark). Alice says he tells her not to go into dark alleyways.

Then she tells us a strange tale of going to see a purging of jinn-infested women. (We are on the rooftop, eating Moroccan style out of a tagine, sipping red wine, the empty bottles of which must be carefully brought out and disposed of one by one, so as not to offend the neighbours in this dry-but-not-dry part of the city). They wore black, Alice tells us. They brought offerings to the river – bread, milk, chickens, a hedgehog.

(A hedgehog? )

Yes, a hedgehog, she says. But the hedgehog was simply flung to the riverbank, while the chickens were beheaded. A man gave the bread to the river and scattered the milk. The women, or some of them, began to convulse and make strange guttural sounds, an indication that they could see the devil.

***

27.06.10

Islam is everywhere and nowhere here. You breathe it in at night; it seeps into your ears with each adhan, and yet it feels such an organic substance, as if were part of the molecules of the air, that it is sometimes easy to forget the foreignness of things.

One of Alice’s friends, a teacher at the school where Alice is studying Arabic, sips mint tea with us one afternoon. She is 25, a student of Tajwīd, recitation of the Qur’an. It is a specific and shockingly intricate art; it takes years to master the correct emphasis and pronunciation. Her love for her religion – not as a religion in the way that we conventionally understand it, but as a topic of study, a thing which lives and breathes itself, a story – is infectious.Really, we decide, our thoughts hazy from the heat (perhaps this is the ideal atmosphere in which to learn – your mind malleable, melting like wax, reforming around each new idea) everything is the same (philosophies, religions); everything is about how we live our lives.

She speaks to us in perfect, almost un-accented English about her own students, some of whom are ambivalent still about having a female tutor.

Strange this balance, I think. How sometimes you find yourself thinking, here: ‘there’s so much!’. And at other times, ‘there’s so little!’ It’s so cramped, so open. So hostile and yet so friendly.

***

28.06.10

Later, at the local hammam, topless, filthy, I sit on the hot tiled floor while another woman, topless too, her hair wrapped in a white scarf to keep it from her face, scrubs me vigorously. We do not speak the same language, but when she wrenches me round so she can scrub my front, and holds my arm up with a smile and a tsk to indicate how much dirt she has brought to the surface, how much dead skin will be washed away with the next bucket of water, we are in the same moment, inhabiting the same world. Maybe later I pass her on the street, and do not know it – she shrouded by a hijab, me pale-skinned and wide-eyed like every other Western tourist, each of us indistinguishable in spite of that moment of intimacy.

But in that moment: how unselfconscious I feel! Usually so aware of things – unsightly folds of skin, the size of my breasts. But the folds are like everyone else’s folds, and my breasts are certainly no larger than most of the other women’s, and the water, the steam, the scrubbing all act as a drug, and an hour and a half slips by unnoticed.

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We have been, we are, travelling. We are in a state of travel. Dispossessed, half-asleep, gripped by other worlds (Moroccan spiced coffee, of which my bag now smells, and the distant Irish troubles of the 1920s, of which I have been reading), totally and utterly outside the moment and space we’re actually in.

We are however capable of looking towards the future: what will we have for dinner? Probably Chinese, or else pizza – and someone will deliver it swiftly and practically wordlessly to our house, and we will not say shokran, nor will the man who delivers our dinner expect anything, or see any disparity (class, colour, religion) between us and him. Our street will seem miraculously wide and the drunks exceptionally loud and we will for awhile miss (or at least unconsciously feel the lack of) the five calls to prayer, particularly the one just before dawn. Perhaps we will wake then, each of us, silently, without even knowing the other, too, is conscious of the quiet hour. We will hear the yelp of bicycle wheels or the moan of an errant car alarm, and then, comforted by this intrusion of noise, we will sleep again, through the dawn, too late, wake bathed in hot light, angry, minds elsewhere.

There is no possibility of jet-lag (no time difference, not that I was ever even vaguely aware of the time as we traipsed through the medina), but we will pretend that we’re travel-weary and in doing so, convince ourselves that we are travel-weary and jet-lagged after all, and people will know how to interpret the haze in our eyes, for we will say, ‘Oh yes, we’ve been in Morocco’. I despair of how that will sound – arrogant, perhaps? Though we hardly mean for it to.

It’s just that the way time moves alarms me. On the way to the airport, we say glibly that it hardly seems a week could possibly have passed since we were on the way to the medina, and I’m reminded of a dream I had shortly before we left, in which we departed and then suddenly I found myself returning, thinking, ‘but that was so quick, and we hardly did anything we said we would!’

Everything, really, is a variation of that dream – how else did I arrive at the age of 23, when just yesterday I was 20, and travelling back from Fés with a newfound lover, making lists in the back of my notebook of the furniture I would have to buy in order to furnish my apartment in Boston when I got back in September; and crying at the ending of John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, when really I meant to cry at my predicament, at the seeming impossibility of being parted by an ocean (not to mention a thousand yards of red tape, a thousand pounds, a thousand moments of yearning and wishing and resenting) from my love. Three years ago? No, that was three minutes ago, or else three centuries ago. We live always on dream-time, moving through molasses, or being propelled at the speed of light through our own experiences.

…and here we are now. Replicating the journey physically at least, though now I make no lists, because the house in Oxford is already full of our things (mostly our books), because I have a visa that makes my life there valid. “Oh September, where did you go?” is the refrain of the song I’m listening to, and oh how often I find myself thinking that! Without even knowing which September I mean. Perhaps I mean the first September I ever saw – how would I know? And what difference could it possibly make? It was September and now it is not and soon enough it will be again – this is an inevitable, unvarying truth. Leaves will fall again from the cherry trees in our garden and I will sit mournfully in my study and say, “Oh June, where did you go?” – wondering how the green could fade so fast.

Speaking of which, where did June go? For already it is July and Wimbledon is nearly over and soon our friends’ son will celebrate his first birthday, when this time last year he was only an idea, crouching in his mother’s body, a being who both did and did not exist as we took a break from our investigations into the life and writings of P.G. Wodehouse to eat cold fruit and watch the tennis, while outside on Plantation Road the elderly shuffled past, gasping in the heat, sweat forming in the ravines of their facial wrinkles. September indeed!

(Later I think how funny: for although we’ve been travelling all day, I am now inexplicably, unexpectedly, in England, at home, as if I had been moved like a chess piece from one place to another, as if the time and space between there and here had been erased.)

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I forget how quickly the medina eats away the hours of a day. At first it is morning, and then suddenly we are looking at the sky saying Oh, it’s eight o’clock (not that time matters much – it’s more that suddenly dinner becomes important, or sleep).

The sun has sunk now. We’re all on the terrace, even the dogs, who are fickle in their attentions, though lovingly so – as if, I think, they are trying to distribute themselves evenly among us, so that none of us is disappointed for long by the lack of dog’s head in lap.

Last night I went out and took photographs of the minaret near Ali and Alice’s house in the moonlight. The darkness here is characterized by light. The religious symbolism of this does not entirely escape me – at a christening last week in Christ Church cathedral, we were asked to help the baby walk always in light – but I find it difficult just now 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 here, 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, always bathed in light, even at the cold hour of midnight. Awoken at 5 am 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.

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I haven’t been great about blogging lately (I haven’t been great about writing lately), but I think my life has actually gone mad, or else merged with someone else’s. I keep having the sensation that I’m swimming through my days. The water is viscous but beautiful; it’s a slow going and dreamlike route through the week.

Sunday, for instance. Which started with a church and ended with Blondie – from Mary to “Maria” in just a few hours.

We spent the morning in Christ Church Cathedral for a christening. I’d never been to a christening before. We were running late as always and my shoes had rubbed the side of my foot raw. Irrationally I fretted over the right way to behave. I worried the blood from the blister marked me out as an impostor amongst the Christian lambs. Churches always make me feel this way. I am awed by the architecture, the dark alcoves, the stained glass and the weight of history, but the rigidity of the ceremony – more than that, the implication of a shared knowledge – gives me the same anxieties that being at a party full of people I don’t know does. I don’t know what to do or not do, where to go or not go, and the insecure part of me is like a child who wants to be part of a club she doesn’t belong to. Everyone else is doing it so why can’t I?

We sang hymns. I can read music and I can read words but I can’t do both at the same time. I sing quietly because I still don’t know the rhythms of all these songs, can’t anticipate the collective extra breath that everyone will take at the start of a new line.

In front of me sat a little girl with long blond hair, a pink dress, and pink shoes. While the rest of us rose and sat like a bunch of finely-dressed, mad meercats, sticking our heads up to try to see the choir, then bending them in prayer, she pored over a book. Her hair spilled into her face and she pushed it back impatiently and got through several chapters of something by Enid Blyton. That’s a club I could belong to; but the funny thing is that for all the freedoms adulthood grants you, it also prohibits so much.

And then there was a sudden moment, like a breath between lines of a hymn, full of joy. Behind us were babies laughing and crying and toddlers squirming. Up ahead, as the deacon poured water into the bowl, our friends’ ten-month old son grinned before the entire congregation. He put his fingers into the water, miming the symbolic action. People laughed. Yes, okay, I thought. So we’re in a church but we can laugh. This is good. He was welcomed. He is welcome. (Later he sat on his mother’s lap, eating his mushy lunch, smiling broadly. I remember him as a 5-pound newborn, too fragile to hold up his own head, wearing a generic expression of sleepiness and hunger.)

We refused communion. “Oh, I’m hungry, but not that hungry,” we joked, the Man and I, quietly to ourselves – still reverent even in irreverence. Outside we stood overlooking the quad. That’s the fountain they kept putting Anthony Blanche into, I said. I walked up to the fountain, peered past its lily-pads, into the blackness. Dark fish, mouths gaping, came to the surface, disappeared again. A few bright orange ones flicked their bodies. No, I wouldn’t like to be dropped in there, not amongst the scaly bodies. So that’s fine; look up, at Tom Tower gleaming handsomely, coloured like a honeycomb.

***

Then we were backstage at a Blondie gig in Gloucestershire. Things I never knew: security guards smile at you when you have a special wristband. They look relieved that they are not going to have to tell you off for anything. One of them even gave me earplugs so I could sit nestled up at the base of the stage without losing my hearing.

Debbie Harry wore a black kilt and put the microphone up and 6,000 people sang the chorus to “Maria” with her. I remember the year that song came out and I remember buying No Exit and listening to it over and over again in my CD player. I particularly remember that I wore a blue jumper with a white stripe across it often then.

We drove back with Little Fish in their tour van. I had a cider and then, half-asleep, I sort of sat there just thinking: the more you look at your own history the more interesting it becomes – not in a self-obsessed, navel-gazing way, but in that suddenly you become detached from it. You can see it from an outsider/insider space, an overlap of perspectives. It’s both harder and easier to write about. Am I penning fictions every time I remember something on paper? Yes, of course, in a way.

We got back to Oxford after midnight; it was a hushed, special Sunday darkness. No one around, not even the drunks. We stopped for chicken kebabs. Hunger seemed inconvenient at such an hour but I had reached a point in the night where it was impossible not to eat. As if everything might be erased by sleep, unless sustenance was first obtained.

Nothing was erased by sleep and we woke up tired and smiling.

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