Karim and the Whispering Fountain

About this story

Lalla Zohra once filled the square with her tales, but this year her voice has worn thin as tissue. Instead of the crowd she takes a doorstep near the fountain and tells one story at a whisper to three children and whoever leans close. The smaller her voice becomes, the nearer everyone gathers, until the story ends inside a circle of half-sleeping listeners.

Discovering that softness gathers people closer than strength.

A whisper gathers listeners closer than a shout.

Read the beginning

The lamps of the Fez night market were waking one by one when Grandmother Lalla Zohra opened her mouth to warm up her storytelling voice, and nothing came out. Nothing but a small dry rustle, like a leaf turning over in a doorway. Karim froze with the story carpet half unrolled in his arms, and Zouzou, his little Barbary monkey, went still on his shoulder with a fig halfway to her mouth. Tonight was story night, the biggest night of the whole week. And the storyteller of the whole medina had just lost her voice.

High above the leaning rooftops, a glossy black raven crossed the last rose light of the sky, slow and wide and silent, and turned one calm circle over the boy and the monkey and the little square with the old fountain, the way it always does when a story is about to begin.

Every Thursday night, in that square, Grandmother told her stories. Her voice rolled over the crowd like warm summer thunder, and people came from every twisting lane of Fez to stand in her circle and listen. Already the square was filling. The bread boy came with his empty basket. The tea seller came with his little stool. Children hurried in holding their mothers' hands, all of them waiting for the story. If no story came tonight, they would all walk home with nothing to dream on.

Grandmother knelt down and took Karim's hands, and her whisper was thin as tissue paper. "You know the tale of the patient traveler and the blue gate," she said. "You have heard it a hundred times. It lives in you, Karim. Tonight it needs your voice." Karim's tummy flipped like a fish in a bucket. His voice was the smallest voice in the whole family. Zouzou patted his cheek with one tiny hand, as if to say, you can, you can.

So Karim stepped up onto the storyteller's spot, right in the middle of the square, and made his voice as big as it would go. "ONCE," he called, "THERE WAS A TRAVELER!" But the market was rattling its shutters and clinking its glasses, and his small voice blew away like a moth in the wind. The children waited politely. Then they began to fidget. Somebody's mother looked up at the sky.

Karim's cheeks went hot, and his eyes began to sting. "I can't," he whispered. "I'm too quiet." He wanted to run home through the lanes and hide under his blanket and never tell a story again. Zouzou hid her face in his neck, and at the edges of the square, the crowd began to drift away like smoke.

Then, out of the dark, the raven came down on soft black wings and settled on the rim of the old fountain, calm as an old friend. It did not look at Karim at all. It only tilted its head, once, toward the water.

Karim listened. And there, underneath all the noise of the square, the fountain was telling its own story, water on old stone, soft and low and never stopping. The fountain never shouted. It never needed to. And yet the cats came to it, and the swallows at dusk, and every thirsty traveler in Fez. Everyone leaned close to the fountain, because quiet things ask you to come close.

The story goes on in the video.