Literary Fiction
by El Mehdi Said
On Derb el Hafa — the street of the edge, where one quarter of old Fez stops being itself and the next has not yet begun — two families share a single thin wall.
On Derb el Hafa — the street of the edge, where one quarter of old Fez stops being itself and the next has not yet begun — two families share a single thin wall. A Muslim clerk's household. A Jewish goldsmith's household. Within four years they have become what the old streets make and the new ones can no longer explain: one household with two doors. Idriss is the orphan the clerk takes in, in 1905. Ester is the goldsmith's daughter. They sleep head to foot in the same cradle. They grow up as one child in two bodies — until the autumn the wall stops being a wall and becomes a boundary. After that, they love each other the way the street allows: at four paces, for fourteen years, with a whole community keeping the ledger. Then Idriss walks twenty-two paces in full view of eleven doorways and asks for her properly. And Si Moshi Toledano — the man who keeps other people's lives in sixty-one locked drawers and has never touched one dirham that was not his — must decide what his daughter's heart is worth against a standing that took a lifetime to build. He says yes. They marry on the sixteenth of April, 1927. They have two days. What follows is fifty-three years of an answer: a widow's fidelity that becomes the conscience of a street, and an elegy for a Fez of shared fountains, shared walls, and shared grief — set against treaty, riot, epidemic, and a country being taken over by somebody else. For readers of Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees, Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, and Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet. 'Two days is not nothing... I waited twenty-one years with a wall in the way. I can wait the rest.'