Gayla Marty

Blue door

Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia

A few hours ago, my dear friends dropped me off and installed me here in Sidi Bou Saïd north of Tunis. For the month of Ramadan I have my own flat on the top floor of a family home. It’s outside the heat of the central city, yet close enough to make my research trips easily enough.

A narrow street comes to a T at this address, and here on the rooftop terrace, that street gives me a view northwest. Beyond a silhouette of tall thin trees, maybe cypress or arbor vitae, the sky turned pink after sunset and is darkening now.

Three stories above the street, I sit at a table. The floor is gray tile. Before me are rows of empty clotheslines, a low wall, and windows of the homes across the street below. The wall on my right is higher, separating this terrace from the one next door. On the left there is a long, low tiled sink for use in cleaning and laundry. Next to that is a gate to the ornate, black-metal spiral stair that descends to the tiny courtyard of the landlady’s family house.

At my back is the flat. It has a tiny sitting room with faded green sectional couches, a bedroom, tiny bathroom, and kitchen, all wrapping around the building’s inner air shaft that allows exchange of air, light, and sound. Inside the flat, I hear the family’s voices below. Outside I hear sounds coming from other homes and terraces and flats up and down the street.

This is the most famous seaside town of Tunisia, gathering place at the turn of the last century of some of Europe’s most famous artists, who painted and wrote about it—Paul Klee, August Macke, Gustave Flaubert. Everything is white with blue trim. I am on the back of the hill, facing inland, apart from the touristed area yet close to the little commuter train to Tunis, a short walk to the sea or to Carthage. I have no view of the water, and the only living trees I can see are the Dr. Seuss-like columns a block away.

But there is one more tree. On the big blue wooden door from the terrace into the flat is an image of a fountain made from black studs pounded into the wood in the rustic Tunisian style. To me it’s a tree, taller than me, branches falling like water, like a willow. Beside it I perch here like a bird on the built-in bench, on the tile surface of blue, green, and white, at a white table, writing and watching the stars come out over this ancient land.

Fig tree

Salakta, Tunisia

I’m finally back, jet-lagged after 24 hours of travel from Minneapolis through New York and Paris. I left Friday. Waking here yesterday, the overwhelming sense was of quietness and soft air.

It was Sunday morning at my friend’s summer house near the sea. She came to get me up and we went out to eat breakfast on the terrace in the shade. I could write about only the garden! We ate fresh green figs, picked from their tree, and fresh grapes from a vine. The little house is so beautiful, like a dream, simple, unfinished yet, but much further along than on my first visit almost two years ago. The rest of the family joined us—her husband, their three grown children, and the visiting daughter of a friend. We ate bread and chemiya (sesame cake) and drank dark coffee and spoke a jumble of English, Arabic, and French.

She took me up on the roof for a view before she went to the market. At the top of the stairs sits a solar collector, like a giant notepad. The light is so bright here, the latitude of Santa Fe and Carolina. To the east I could see the sea a short walk away, and to the west, the flat agricultural landscape.

The property is shaped like an L, surrounded by a white wall. The house and terrace are built into the corner. Between the gate from the street and the house is the driveway and a side yard that contains the fig tree and grapevine. It was this fig tree around which my friend’s architect husband planned everything else. Past the terrace is a space with seven small trees—almond and peach and lemon among them.

We ate a late lunch. I helped a little as mother and daughters prepared it—salade meshwaya, fresh tomato sauce, cucumber and tomato salad, grilled fish, a gorgeous green glass bowl of fruit—grapes, green figs, peaches—that the eldest daughter arranged. After that we drank strong mint tea, and then my friend laid a mat in the shade on the terrace and put me down for a nap. After the weeks of preparing for this trip, exhaustion of working for a year with hardly a break to save up vacation, squeezing in an Arabic class, the anxiety of research and packing for six weeks away, I am relieved to be here. Now the anxiety is for all the work to be done, wondering if I can make the connections I hope to make, if technology will work, if I will be up to all I have planned. Yet I feel the crazy American rush ebbing out of my muscles, lucky to be such a good friend’s care, lucky to stand beneath a fig tree and smell the sweet fruit.

As I woke, the family was saying mid-afternoon prayer on the terrace, facing the gate beyond the fig tree, the direction of Mecca. Father and son stood in front in white, mother in dark green, two of the young women in black and white. Under the clear blue sky, the breeze blew their robes.

Past midnight, last thing, I went up on the roof and saw the old crescent moon, orange above the eastern horizon. That old moon will vanish this week, and when the new moon comes, it will be Ramadan.