A Window in a Blue City

by Nick Polutchko (United States of America)

Making a local connection Morocco

There are shades of blue in Chefchaouen, Morocco that seem to exist nowhere else in the world. It was one of those shades of blue that held my attention as I stood across the narrow clay alley from the shop. And because I was looking up at the two-story clay building, I didn’t notice the man coming out of the shop until he was almost directly beside me. I glimpsed him out of the corner of my eye. He looked at me, turned his face up towards where I was looking, looked back at me, and then back to where I was looking. He finally said, in pretty good English, “What you looking at man?” He had the light olive skin and the short black peppered beard that many of the shop owners across the country seemed to have. And his eyes were round and bright. He was wearing an earth-toned djellaba and I could see dull red pants from his shins down. “Just the window” I replied and smiled at him because he was smiling at me. “It’s a good window” he nodded, then after a short pause, “better looking from inside” and he pointed up and behind us. “You want to see?” I looked up at the building behind me trying to imagine what was over and beyond it. He smiled again, “Come” and he walked towards the shop. Admittedly, I did hesitate for a second, as I had been through my fair share of mediocre sales pitches since the beginning of my trip. But then again, travelers aren’t known to lack curiosity. The entrance of the shop wasn’t unlike other rug shops I had seen in this or other medinas, although the patterns and colors were still mesmerizing. The man was at the back of the room and had turned and started up a staircase that I wouldn’t have otherwise known was there as it was covered in rugs like every other inch of floor and wall space. He disappeared and I walked across a bright blue rug with yellow stitches in the shape of a star and triangles. The staircase was dark, and the railing was draped with rugs, but it was not a long staircase and I could see the light in the room above. When I reached the top of the stairs, I could see the building across the street through the window. The man was pouring tea into a small glass over mint leaves and his silhouette was framed well by the window. He sat down on a stack of rugs the height of a small chair, and when I got closer he motioned me to the seat across from him which looked like a couch made completely of stacked and rolled rugs. As I went to sit another man came up the stairs and poured more tea. He was introduced as the man’s younger brother. The brother then handed me one of the tea glasses, and we all looked out the window at the light coming over the hills from the sun that must have just set behind it. I looked around at one of the rugs. A rug was something I had never really considered buying. And then I looked back out the window. The brother had brought with him a sort of notebook, and as the man put his glass down, the brother handed the man the book. He told me about all of the different people who had written logs in this book from visiting his shop. European families, African couples, and U.S. diplomats all writing a sentence or paragraph about their experience in the Blue City. The skeptical side of me inspected the handwriting when the book was passed to me, and as I read on, the men looked out the window and joked with each other— in English. I closed the book and put it beside me and finally decided to bite. I looked at a deep navy rug with a white pattern and pointed to it. “Can you tell me about this one?”