444
MARK MIRSKY
hopping with enthusiasm over a box of strawberries, a walk to a
mountain waterfall and the children from the synagogue clustered
around him with that crazy tenderness they have for adults who have
never grown up. I recognized him as he begged me to stay a few more
days, go to Meknes with him, the coast. My double. a holy Nebbechel. I
panicked.
Yet Fez was fantastic, the city lives still in a Babylonian twilight,
old Fez at least, its streets too narrow for any transport but donkeys.
One wanders in a hopelessly confusing maze of alleys from which you
must finally pay someone to extract you, through twisting trunklines
where the smell of excrement, spearmint, hashish, perfume, rotting
tomatoes, cabbage, carrots, move one back and forth from disgust to
ravishment; streets where they blow still upon the coals of primitive
forges, blacksmiths; of wooden shuttles, children holding the spools
for their father, the tailor; whole families banging away on sheets of
copper and brass copying designs from the mosque doors; open stalls
of the carpenters where sawdust fills the air and stables of raw brown
and white wool spilling out, the innards of a giant's pillow; streets
where the dye is still stirred by hand, hand dipped, puddles of purple,
red, in that road, cloth squeezed over the river bank so that the waters
run mirky with color. Every third man has a dropped eye, an ampu–
tated limb. Wet dough on the heads of the girls being borne to the
communal bakery where like the demipotentate of Pharaoh's Egypt, the
baker regulates the neighborhood insertion of its daily miracle, the
risen bread. And then one comes to the cool white chessboards of the
mosques hidden in the midst of squalidness, those courtyards which
are altars of the sun, one walks the walls of orange mud which girdle
Fez with gun loopholes, towers of stone and sand, ancient, horrible,
marvelous. No, close your eyes
to
Tangiers and come on
to
Fez before
we Americans break through the walls with our cars, air conditioning,
electricity and sell the dirt back to the Moroccans as a souvenir.
We talk abQut how crowded the world is but in these old, old
streets one feels what it means to overpopulate a nest. Human beings
cluster naturally like bees (or rats).
I understand the Sabbath, the day of rest.
I keep seeking out synagogues, as if the door to Paradise lay con–
cealed in the dusty tiles, beyond the broken ark of these deserted boxes
of prayer. In Tangiers the tarnished silver hangings, a confused heap
of filigreed lamps as I hoist myself up on a window sill to look in, are
