At the Gate

The buzzing at the front door was insistent, but when I opened it I was still surprised to see an agitated man holding a pick ax over his head and yelling at me in Arabic. Out of the shadows came a second man, who attempted to translate the tirade to French.

Here’s the thing. Most houses in Marrakech are located on a derb, or street. A standard street address includes the name of the derb, the number of the house, as well as the neighborhood of the derb. By contrast, our address is simply 86 Sidi Ben Slimane; we have no derb. This is akin to having an address like 86 Greenwich Village, NYC, instead of 86 Jane St., Greenwich Village, NYC. In a word: confusing. Our derb-less state exists because our house is immediately next to the mosque that gives name to the neighborhood. For most of its history, the house belonged to the mosque and housed employees of the mosque. To try to clarify things for the mailman and others, it’s been suggested that we add the word Souikat to the end of our address. The word means “little market” and, though we’re next to a mosque and not a market, suggests the center of the neighborhood.

To enter our house, we first pass through a gate we share with the mosque. In the shared hallway are doors to the mosque, a kindergarten, the house of a retired Imam, and us. When we arrived, the metal gate had been stripped of its lock. Hamoud suggested we might like to replace the lock, and on our behalf confirmed with the neighbors that they were amenable. We liked the idea, but it never made much of a fight climbing our ever changing to do lists. That changed, eventually, as a group of teenage boys took to using the hallway late at night as a place to play cards and hang out away from the watchful eyes of parents. When it rained, the covered hall became even more popular. As the kids carried on, whooping and shouting till the early hours of the morning, we suddenly became much more interested in locking the gate, and we turned our “metal man” from other projects to this one. He bought a top quality lock and installed it, giving us the five keys included in the box. Over the next couple days, we left the gate unlocked, and gave one key to each tenant as we saw them.

Keys distributed, we began locking the gate at night, and the noise vanished. Each evening, the Muezzin locked the gate after the final prayer of the day, and opened it before the first prayer around 5 AM the next morning. A few days later, there’s a knock on the door, and I open it to find a jolly fellow. I’m not quite sure who he is, but he’s quite friendly, explains that he’s from the mosque and needs another key for the gate. I smile and give him mine. He pats my shoulder, shakes my hand and wanders off. The following day, as I’m returning home and passing the bakery on one side and the hamman on the other – both emitting lovely smells as ever – I hear shouting behind me. A man approaches and complains that the muezzin had overslept that morning and missed the call to prayer. This man was the backup, and as the Muezzin had the key he couldn’t get in. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that a Muezzin could oversleep, and was happy to hear that it happens even to the best of us. I told him I was sorry the Muezzin had overslept, and that he should feel free to have the him make the keys for whomever he deemed needed them. As he agreed, he visibly relaxed, smiled and melted into the crowd. I asked Hamoud about the incident, and he laughed and told me not to worry, that it was the mosque’s responsibility to deal with the keys. Hamoud has warned us about neighbors asking us to pay for things, and already dealt with one angry man who was mad at Hamoud for not giving him bags of our concrete during the renovation. “It’s never one bag of concrete,” he told us at the time. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg, and once you’re in, they’ve got you.”

So, there I am in the doorway, and the angry man waves his pick ax. His translator tells me that there are four people responsible for the mosque, and that they need four keys. I try to avoid the conversation and give him Hamoud’s cell phone number, but he’s not interested. “You’re the owner of the house,” he tells me, “not Hamoud.” As the translator tells me that the man is threatening to break the lock off the gate (something that’s pretty clear from his gesticulations with the pick ax) my French, suddenly gets really bad. I claim I need Hamoud to properly translate for me, and take his number, promising to have Hamoud call them.

The keys, of course, cost about three dollars each, and it seems foolish to let any animosity develop over six dollars. I’m not sure what principle is at stake here. Hamoud has assured us that we only need to give one key, and that if we were Moroccan, they would never have asked for a second key, let alone four. Neither the kindergarten nor the other apartment asked for additional keys. If it was one of them or the man who’d asked Hamoud for our concrete, it’d be easier to ignore, but the angry tenant is a mosque. By now, the teenagers who have been robbed of their hang out have jammed our lock with broken wires, necessitating a couple of calls to the “metal man.” Is this more trouble than it’s worth? Are we being good neighbors? Are they? Can you ever go wrong being the magnanimous ones? We’re not sure where this is heading, and whether we really need the gate to lock. In the meantime, we bumble along.