Les Copains

We’ve never had a front entry hall before. In all of our apartments, and even our house, the front door opened directly into the living room. So the fact that we’ve got a real live entry hall at Dar Noury has been cause for some mild celebration, silly as it may sound. It’s been hard to imagine what it might look like after it’s finished. It started out with a sink right in front of the door, which evidently didn’t fit in the bathroom. And as the walls were skinned back to the underlying brick, it seemed impossible that it would ever be finished.



But from the bedroom window of our rental, we saw a broken old window frame that we thought could make a dramatic mirror. The window was on the roof of an adjacent little general store, and since the store doesn’t sell our preferred brand of water, we don’t shop there. So it’s with a little guilt that I approach the shopkeeper, who recognizes me from the 10 times a day I pass his store with bags from other shops, and ask him about buying the window frame. He’s friendly enough, but tells me that it belongs to the landlord, the woodworker with a shop across the street who just left town on vacation.

Of course, this only makes things worse. The woodworker is quite friendly to us. He and his friends at adjacent shops, a barber and a realtor, pull up chairs in front of door and chat most of the day. Sometimes they’ll bring a little radio and listen to it late at night under our bedroom window as we’re trying to fall asleep. We’d been thinking of buying something like a small coffee table from him as a neighborly gesture until Hamoud told us the woodworker is over priced, and any design of his we liked we should take to Hamoud who’d get it made for less. The woodworker knows we’ve bought a house and has intimated he’d like to sell us something; we’ve indicated we’d wait till we’re finished with the house.
“How’s the house,” he’d ask as we came home.
“Petit a petit,” we’d reply. It’s the first half of the popular French expression, “little by little, the bird builds his nest.” One day he nodded knowingly, and shared with us a Moroccan version of the expression. “Little by little, the camel enters the marmite.” Moroccan marmite is a large meat stew made for family holidays, not the repulsive British spread. The point is, that when you’re making a meat stew, no matter how big, it takes a fare bit of work chopping up the camel into pieces and making a stew of it.

After a couple weeks, the woodworker returns, and we debate who’s going to ask about the window. The broken window. The old broken window. Should we call it rotten? Should we say, we’d take it so he wouldn’t have to go to the bother of throwing it out? The following morning, we open the door to head out, and there’s the woodworker sitting in front of our door. No time like the present so we start in about the window. He’s quite friendly and offers to sell it to us if we get a ladder to climb up on the roof and look at it. We ask about cost, and he replies that we won’t have a problem with him about price. He likes us, he says. Likes chatting as we come and go. We thank him for looking after the place, and dumping the occasional bottle of water over the plants by the front door. I’m trying to turn our little love fest to our advantage. We’re neighbors after all, and that’s got to be good for something. But as I’m speaking, the word for neighbor eludes me for a second. As I’m trying to say, we’re voisins, I say instead that we’re copains, and while you can rhyme the two in a pop song, a copain is a very good friend, sometimes used for a significant other, and now I’m wondering how to back pedal. It’s out there, that we’re these great friends. Do I now say, “no, we’re not great friends, I misspoke. We’re just neighbors?” Or is that worse, should I just let it stand and hope that he chalks it up to cultural differences or my language skills? And he steadfastly refuses to state a price, repeating with a big smile that we’ll have no problem with him about the window. How hard a bargain can we drive with our new copain? We smile and back our way out into the street and disappear into a throng of video camera wielding Italian tourists.

The problem has not gone away, but it has been put off for want of a ladder tall enough to scale the wall of the shop. He’s promised to bring one in a few days and I guess then we’ll know the truth: are we voisins or copains?