Goodbye, Fez

I was prodded awake by an airport security boot.  I rolled over and glared blearily at the owner of the boot, punched my suitcase into a better pillow shape and straightened the bed of clothes I was sleeping on, trying to get some cushioning on the cold metal shelf.

            “Salaam alaikum,” I said.

            “Wa alaikum salaam,” he said.  One thing I love about ritual greetings is that they’re so engrained that you respond automatically, no matter the situation – even when the person you’re greeting is a vagrant who’s sleeping in a restricted area.

 

            “All is well?” I continued.

            “All is well.”

            “How is it with you, brother?”

            “It is fine, brother.”

            “Alhamdu lilah.”

            “Alhamdu lilah.”

            The security guard paused.  It’s hard to yell at someone for vagrancy when you’ve just finished praising Allah together. 

            “Why are you here?” he said.

            “I am sleeping.”

            “Why are you sleeping here?”

            It was a good question.  I was on the bottom of a rack of steel shelves set into the wall of the baggage handlers’ area in the Casablanca airport.  It had gotten colder during the night, and the cold of the metal had reached through my makeshift bedding and set me shivering.  Not comfy, but a lot cheaper than a taxi ride and a hotel.  The airline had cancelled my flight without telling me, and my flight was the next day, so it seemed easiest just to stay at the airport. 

            “It’s clean here, and no one will kill me in my sleep.”

            “You cannot sleep here.”

            “My friend, be kind.  I came from Fez last night to fly to Egypt, but my plane was not here.  I have another plane today, but I can’t afford a hotel.  I just want to sleep a little.” 

            He fingered the shirt cuffs of his spiffy new uniform nervously; I don’t think his training manual covered this.

            “You cannot sleep here.  But if you need to sleep, you can go to my family’s house.  My mother will cook breakfast.”

            I blinked.  No matter how long I’m in this country, intense and sudden displays of generosity always catch me by surprise.  He meant it, too.

            “That isn’t necessary.  But thank you very much.  It is time to get up anyway.”

            The security guard helped me gather my things and stuff them into my suitcase. 

            “I’ll see you, brother,” he said.

            “I’ll see you, inshallah.”

            “Ma salaama.”

            “Ma salaama.”

            I was in a good mood as I staggered over to the airport café, considering the fact I’d just spent the night in a luggage shelf.  It was partly because of the short but beautiful human connection I’d just shared, and partly because the entire conversation had been in Arabic. 

            That would have seemed impossible even a month and a half ago.  Arabic, in case I’ve failed to mention it before, is hard.  The conjugations, the pronunciation, the persnickety grammar – it’s a bitch, and what makes it harder is that that no one actually speaks the type of Arabic I know.  I’d pretty much given up on the idea of having any kind of real conversation in it and was just biding my time until I could take a break from Classical to learn a local dialect.  This was frustrating, since it meant that I wasn’t going to be able to have any close relationships with locals in Morocco.

            A mentor appeared in the unlikely form of Ozzie, a nineteen-year-old American student at my school who shared a house with me for a few months.  Ozzie would be the first to admit that he wasn’t the world’s greatest student – his attendance was spotty, homework was a vague suggestion, and he had a habit of taking long trips overseas in the middle of the school term.  But put this kid on the street, and he was like a goddamn local.  He reeled off slang words and local greetings, switching from Classical to dialect seamlessly.  Walking with Ozzie through the old medina was always an exercise in patience, because he’d have to stop every ten feet to talk to a friend – not just say hi, but do the full handshake, ritual greeting, pull in for the kiss on either cheek.  Most of the Arabic he used every day he’d never learned in class, just picked it up during the hours every day he spent at the local shops, sipping mint tea and bullshitting with his friends. 

            Once I realized Ozzie wasn’t putting on a show, that he actually did enjoy this stuff, my first thought wasn’t very charitable:  I’m supposed to be the fucking Peace Corps.  He was picking up an entire language (two languages, really) just from osmosis and practice, the way human beings are supposed to.  Peace Corps had taught me that was the best way to understand a culture and a tongue, but somehow a year and a half in the States had made me forget it.  I thought I could pick it up from lectures and textbooks, which is absurd.  Language isn’t about the classroom, it’s about the world, and if you don’t want to speak to locals, why are you learning it in the first place?

            Of course, it’s a lot easier to say that than to live it.  It’s tough for an ADD boy from the world of hash tags and streaming video to sit down in a shop for an hour and struggle to just talk.  For every idea successfully communicated there’s five minutes where you just smile and nod, not understanding what the hell they’re talking about and not feeling it’s worth it to find out.  You tend to have the same couple conversations over and over. 

            But once I started making the commitment, it really paid off.  My speaking and comprehension shot up, making more progress in a few weeks than in the three months before.  I made friends in the medina, real friends, not just guys that I saw sometimes and said hi to.  I ate at their houses, met their families.  Yesterday I made a final circuit of my neighborhood to make my goodbyes.  I thought it would take about half an hour, instead it took three.  I hadn’t realized just how many friends I’d made here or how attached I’d become. 

            There are two guys in particular I’ll miss.  Saiid runs a teleboutique, a small shop with public phones that also sells well as candies and sodas and whatnot.  Every time I walked in his face would light up and he’d clear a place for me to sit behind the counter.  Once I told him that I needed a pair of running pants, but I didn’t want to get ripped off.  Right in the middle of the day, he closed up his shop, walked me over to a friend of his on the other side of the medina, and got me a cheaper price than I’d seen anywhere else. 

At one point we were having a conversation about why Western women feel so uncomfortable in Morocco, with the constant harassment on the streets.  Saiid told me that most of the young men here are decent guys, but many were dogs, sniffing and barking after every skirt they see.  He acted it out, getting down on all fours and pretending to chase after an American girl, and I laughed so hard I think I peed a little.  After that, every time we were in his shop and we saw a young guy harassing women in the street we’d bark and howl at him.

            Another man, Aziz, owned a general store near our old house.  He’s the kind of guy you want to get to know, with connections throughout the city – it’s weird the number of times I’ve been in a completely different part of Fez, I’ll mention the neighborhood where I live, and they’ll say, “Do you know Aziz?”  His shop is just a hole in the wall – no seating, you can’t even go inside – but it’s one of the major community hubs, with people stopping by at all hours to pick up something for the house or just hang out for a while.  I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time hanging out by that shop, one arm on the counter, chatting with the endless flow of neighborhood denizens that is always streaming by. 

One time I went out with Aziz to a bar, actually a fairly classy joint, which is unusual for Fez.  We met some Lithuanian tourists and went back to their riad for drinks.  I hadn’t seen Aziz drink that much, but apparently he’d been knocking them back without me noticing, because at about one in the morning the riad manager quietly told me that I needed to clean up my friend and get him home.  I found him bent over the Moroccan toilet (which is just a hole in the floor), looking like absolute hell.  Together we trekked through the medina, stopping every fifty yards or so for him to be sick.  It was an interesting evening, worth a little XP if nothing else.

All this means that I finally lived in Fez.  I loved the city as soon as I set foot in it, but I loved it as an outsider, exploring the winding alleys and watching the bustle of life.  Once I made some relationships, I was actually a part of that life.

            I would say I’m sorry to leave, but that wouldn’t be true.  Not that I’m eager to get away from Fez, far from it, but my next step is just so goddamn cool that I don’t have much regret.  For those of you unaware, I’m heading to Cairo.  I’m planning to study the Egyptian dialect, which is the most widely spoken of the dialects thanks Egypt’s prolific media industries.  Just about everyone in the Middle East can at least understand Egyptian, since they’ve been listening to it their entire lives. 

More than that, though, I get to watch history happen.  Egypt is in many ways a new country, with all the birthing pains and uncertainty that entails.  The signs aren’t all positive; it’s going to be a long and difficult road – and I’m lucky enough to see it take the first steps.