The Blue City and the Wandering Scholar

Reading time: 8-10 minutes  |  Ages: 6-12  |  Tradition: Moroccan  |  Theme: hospitality

The city of Chefchaouen is painted blue.

Not one kind of blue – not the flat, decided blue of a painted wall – but every blue there is, shade layered on shade until the streets feel like walking through water, or through a sky that has come down to find out what the earth feels like, or through a place that simply decided one day that blue was the right answer to the question that the mountains were asking.

The mountains in question are the Rif, and they are considerable, and they stand around the blue city the way older siblings stand around something small and notable: protective, slightly amused, clearly fond.

A girl called Fatima lived in the blue city with her grandmother, her two aunts, and four cousins in a house that had three rooms and a courtyard where a lemon tree grew in a clay pot so large it was a mystery how it had been brought inside in the first place.

Fatima was nine years old. She kept the house clean, fed the lemon tree, helped her grandmother make m’hanncha (the serpent pastry that coiled like a beautiful idea and smelled of almonds and orange blossom) and attended school down the hill where the blue faded into the ordinary brown of the valley road.

One afternoon in October, a scholar arrived.

He was not remarkable to look at – a man of perhaps forty with dusty shoes and a notebook that had been rained on more than once and repaired with what appeared to be used envelope glue. He was, he said, traveling from Fès to the coast by the mountain roads to study the old water systems of the Rif, and he had underestimated the afternoon.

The afternoon, in October in the Rif Mountains, has a way of going dark and cold very quickly, as though it has been waiting for exactly this opportunity.

He knocked on three doors before he knocked on Fatima’s grandmother’s door.

Fatima answered. She was nine years old and she had been told certain things about strangers and she assessed the scholar with the specific calculation of someone who has been paying attention to faces for their whole life.

His shoes were very dusty. His notebook was repaired with envelope glue. He smelled of the road and mountain air and a little of mint tea, which was the smell of someone who had been traveling long enough to have accepted hospitality from other people on the way.

“One moment,” she said, and closed the door gently and went to her grandmother.

Her grandmother was making tea. She did not look up.

“Who is it?”

“A scholar. From Fès. He has been walking the mountain road all day and it’s going dark.”

Her grandmother set down the teapot. “What do you see in his face?”

Fatima thought about this. “Tired. And kind, I think. He thanked me when I said one moment, which was strange because I had closed the door on him.”

“A man who thanks the door that closes against him,” said her grandmother, “is either very patient or very good. In either case he may come in.”

Fatima opened the door. “Please,” she said. “Enter.”

Her grandmother’s hospitality was a form of art. Fatima had watched it all her life: the specific speed of tea-making that communicates urgency without fuss, the placement of the tray that says you are not an interruption, the food that appears so naturally it seems to come from the house itself rather than from work done in advance.

The scholar sat in the courtyard under the lemon tree and ate a bowl of harira soup and bread and olives, and his face changed as he ate in the way faces change when they have been tightened against cold for hours and are now warm.

“I owe you more than this can pay,” he said to Fatima’s grandmother.

“You owe us nothing,” said the grandmother. “The guest brings baraka.”

Baraka: blessing. The guest carries blessing to the house that receives them. This was not sentiment – it was practical theology, understood for a thousand years in the places where the desert road and the mountain road meet and strangers need hospitality to survive.

“What is your name?” Fatima asked the scholar, because she had been curious since the dusty shoes.

“Abdullah,” he said. “And yours?”

“Fatima.”

“Do you know why the city is painted blue?”

She had grown up with the blue and had never thought to ask why. “No.”

“Some say it was the Jewish community who first painted their homes blue, because blue represents the sky and heaven and reminds us to elevate our thoughts. Some say it keeps the mosquitoes away. Some say it was simply beautiful and once begun, could not be stopped, because beauty has a way of continuing itself when people are paying attention.” He looked at the courtyard wall, which was the deep blue of late afternoon shadow. “I think all three are probably true at once.”

“Can three different reasons be true at once?”

“Usually,” said the scholar. “Most important things have more than one reason.”

Fatima thought about this for the rest of the evening while she helped her aunt prepare dinner and the scholar sat writing in his much-repaired notebook by the light of the lamp her grandmother had lit without being asked.

In the morning he left before sunrise, because the mountain road and the coast were still ahead of him. He left a small careful drawing on the last page of his notebook – a lemon tree in a clay pot – and tore it out and placed it by the teapot.

Fatima found it when she was laying breakfast. She brought it to her grandmother.

“What do you think he was studying?” Fatima asked.

“The water systems,” said her grandmother.

“Old water systems.” Fatima looked at the drawing. “Why does someone study old water systems?”

“To understand how people brought water from the mountains to the places that needed it. To learn what the people who came before knew, so we do not have to discover it again from nothing.” Her grandmother poured tea. “Like hospitality. We know this works because a thousand years of people knew it works. The guest brings baraka. This is not a custom invented yesterday.”

Fatima pinned the lemon tree drawing on the courtyard wall.

When you looked at it in the right light, the tree in the drawing looked very much like the tree in the pot, which was exactly as it should be.