The Spider's House (19 page)

Soon they came into view, surrounded by a cloud of dust. About twenty young men were walking with comparative swiftness in a tight group; in their midst, struggling to break through to the outside, and being propelled ahead with the aid of shoves and blows, were two powerfully built
mokhaznia,
their navy blue uniforms hanging from them in strips, so that parts of their bare chests and shoulders showed through. As they heaved themselves desperately against the living wall that imprisoned them, strange sounds like sobs came from their mouths, and their eyes rolled back and forth in their heads like the eyes of madmen. Their faces and necks ran with blood from the blows they had received. In fact, everyone was spattered with it, the captors scarcely less than their prisoners. The dust that was in the air around them they had raised a few paces back, where the alley was covered; now they slid clumsily in the mud. If one of the men began to fall, he was kicked into an upright position by a dozen feet around him. From the corner of his eye Amar saw the cat flatten itself to the roof and, sliding away like a serpent, disappear.

Above the chaos the beggar’s voice continued its hopeful chant, louder than before. He must be crazy, Amar thought, not to realize what was going on right in front of him. But now, when they were directly below him, so that Amar could have spit into their midst, there came the sound of shouts and police whistles from the brighter end of the alley, toward Ras Cherratine. It was as if an electric shock had passed through all of them at the same
instant. Everything happened with lightning speed. The two
mokhaznia
made two final, superlative lunges in opposite directions. The circle gave momentarily; several of the young men lost their balance. Amar felt the impact of their bodies against the wall below him. But at the same time the knives briefly mirrored pieces of the sky; those left standing closed in. One
mokhazni
screamed: “Ahhh!” and the other fell soundlessly. The young men stumbled over each other as they fled back the way they had come. Amar saw the faces of some of them as they panted their final curses above the two figures lying on the ground. They too looked like madmen, he thought, but he had a powerful and senseless desire to be one of them, to know what they had experienced as they had felt the blades of their knives going inside the enemy’s flesh.

Now they were gone, and the beggar was still singing, like some insect in a summer field; if he had moved his right leg forward he would have kicked the head of one of the
mokhaznia.
But he did not move; his face remained tilted upward at the same angle, and his mouth continued to move, forming the holy words. The French would be there in a minute, and they would doubtless drag the poor blind man off to jail as a witness; they were capable of such incredible stupidity.

Amar had raised his head now, and was rapidly examining the topography of the rooftops. It would not be good to be caught up here, but if he jumped down into the alley it was likely that he would fail to get to either end of it before the police arrived. He scrambled to his feet, and carefully stepping over the objects whose contact would give off sound, made his way along the string of roofs until he came to the wall of a higher building. A ledge built the length of this led back from the alley and became a narrow wall dividing two courtyards. Feeling no dizziness and keeping his eyes fixed firmly on his feet, he moved along the top of the wall to its end, and hoisted himself onto another roof there. Looking backward for an instant, he saw that an old woman in the courtyard immediately below was watching his progress with interest. That was bad. “Look the other way, grandmother,”
he said, glancing about the clean-swept surface of the cube-like structure on which he stood. There must be a street somewhere near by.

The old woman’s voice came up from below: “May Allah bless you.” Or had she said: “May Allah burn you?” He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike. At the edge he peered down; there was another wide roof considerably lower than the one where he was at the moment. Further down at the side he saw a marble-paved court, with a small orange tree in each corner, but the angle was such that he could not tell whether or not the street lay beyond. If he jumped down onto the roof it would make a noise; he would have to continue quickly, and it was too far to climb back up to where he stood now. Even had there been no trouble in the city, for him to be caught on the roofs would have meant being taken to jail: the roofs were for the women. A man climbing from terrace to terrace could be only one of two things: a thief or an adulterer. Today of course it was worse. They would simply shoot at him. He said a short prayer, let himself hang down as far as he could, and dropped the rest of the way. If there were people inside the building, they had certainly heard the noise he made when he hit. He ran to the other end of the roof, saw the empty street below, and dropped again, landing very hard with his bare feet flat in the mud. It was a small complicated alley with a great many dead ends where there were merely doors on all sides, and he had to follow several false leads until he had found the exit passage, a little wider than the others, which, after rounding three corners, at last led out into another alley that in turn gave on a through street. Unless one knew a particular
derb
by heart, one could always be fooled. He had come out into the basket
souk
, but how strange it looked, completely boarded up and deserted! If only one among its several dozen shops had been open, it would still have been itself, but this way, only its distinctive shape, its steeply sloping floor and the hundreds of bunches of tiny green grapes that hung from its lattices above made it recognizable.

He decided that for the moment he was safe, that no one had
seen him jump down, and he began to walk. When he turned the corner of the small street that led to the gate of Moulay Idriss, he realized that he would have done better to go in the other direction. A group of French police stood by the gate ahead of him. He hesitated, started to turn around.

“Eh, toi! Viens ici!”
one of them called. Reluctantly he walked toward them. If he had gone the other way, he could have got up through Guerniz, he reflected, but he had come this way. Visions of torture flitted across his mind. They put you between vises and turned the screws until your bones cracked. They covered the floor of your cell with pails full of slippery soap and then smashed bottles on it, then they made you walk back and forth naked, and you kept falling, until you had pieces of glass sticking out of you all around, like the top of a wall. They horsewhipped you, burned you with acids, starved you, made you curse Allah, put strange poisons into you with needles, so that you went crazy and answered whatever questions they asked you. And always they laughed at you, even at the moment when they were beating you. They were laughing now, looking at him, perhaps because it was taking him so long to get to them, for he felt that he was scarcely moving at all. When he got fairly near, the one who had called to him began to speak in a loud voice, but Amar had no idea what he was saying. He stopped walking. The policeman roared:
“Viens ici
!” That he did understand. He moved ahead once again. The man stepped toward him and grabbed him roughly by the shoulder, talking angrily all the while. Unexpectedly he pushed him against the side of a stall behind him, banging his head on the long iron bolt. His movements were sudden, unforeseeable, violent. Now with one enormous red hand across Amar’s throat he pinned him against the wall, while another man lazily approached and looked at him, smiling. This one also spoke to him. He stuck his hands into Amar’s pockets, felt everywhere in the creases of his clothing—silently Amar gave fervent thanks to Allah for having directed him to leave his folding knife at home—and then struck him once on the cheek with the back of his hand. At this point he walked away, as if he were disgusted, either at the contact with
Amar’s flesh or at not having found what he had been looking for. The first man removed his hand from across Amar’s neck, hit him once on the same cheek, exactly as the other had done, and gave him a violent push which sent him sprawling. Amar looked up at him, expecting to see the man’s boot approaching to kick him or stamp on him, but he had turned away, and was sauntering back toward the others. “
Allez! Fous le camp!
” said one who was leaning against the side of the archway. Amar sat up in the muddy street and looked at them; something about his expression—perhaps its mere intensity—displeased one of the other men, for he called the attention of the man beside him to it, and they both came forward toward him, slowly and menacingly. Now his intuition whispered to him that the safe thing to do was to get up and run as fast as he could, that that was what they wanted to see. But he was determined not to give them that satisfaction. With exaggerated care he picked himself up, and not looking at any of them, took a few steps away from them.

Out of prudence he decided to compromise on a limp. And so, clutching at the door of a shop now and then for support, he made his slow progress down the street, sure that from one second to the next a blow would come from behind. When he finally looked back, at a point beyond the exit into the basket
souk,
the walls of the passageway had curved sufficiently to hide the men from his view. He stopped limping and went on to a public fountain, where he laboriously washed the mud from the legs of his trousers. There was not much he could do about the seat of them. The sun was strong now; he sat awhile by the fountain letting it dry the large wet patches he had made on the cloth.

Merely sitting still this way, gazing down the empty street, helped to calm the churning he felt inside his chest. He had just seen two Moslems killed, but he had not felt even a stirring of pity for them: they were in the pay of the French, for one thing, and then they had surely committed some unspeakable crime against their own people to have been singled out that way for annihilation. Although he was grateful for having been vouchsafed the spectacle of their death, he wished it might have been
slower and more dramatic; they had fallen so quickly and unceremoniously that he felt a little cheated. Under his breath he began to invent a long prayer to Allah, asking Him to see to it that every Frenchman, before he was dragged down to Hell, which was a foregone conclusion in any case, might suffer, at the hands of the Moslems, the most exquisite torture ever devised by man. He prayed that Allah might help them discover new refinements in the matter of causing pain and despair, might show them the way to the imposing of hitherto undreamed-of humiliation, degradation and agony. “And drop by drop their blood will be licked by dogs, and ants and beetles will crawl in and out of their shameful parts, and each day we will cut away one more centimeter from each Frenchman’s entrails. Only they must not die,
ya rabi, ya rabi
. Never let them die. At each corner of the street let us have one hung up in a little cage, so when the lepers come by they can use them as latrines. And we will make soap of them, but only for washing the sheets of the brothels. And one month before a woman is to give birth we will pull the child out and make a paste of it and mix it with the flesh of pigs and the excrement from the bellies of the Nazarenes’ own dead, and feed their virgins with it.”

It took energy to invent these fantasies; soon he tired of it, and with a final impassioned invocation, to make his impromptu prayer more formal, he rose and started on his way once more. By taking back streets he might be able to get all the way up to Bou Jeloud. The emptiness of the city spurred him on; he wanted to be in the midst of people. Up there, in the large cafés, there was sure to be at least someone.

CHAPTER 14

He went ahead, up the long steep hill through Guerniz with its great high houses on either side of the street. Here there was always the sweet smell of cedar wood and the gurgling of water behind the walls. A goat stood under an arch and looked out at him with its questioning yellow eyes. Through these streets and squares an occasional well-dressed man hurried, on his way to some nearby house for lunch, and looking askance at Amar, with his battered face and muddy European garments. Each time he caught this expression of fastidiousness mixed with fear he smiled to himself: the ones who wore it were not friends of freedom. It was a sure way of telling. They had what they wanted in this world, and they shared no desire with the students and other youths to see the world change. At the same time it was dangerous to try to judge people’s sympathies by their appearance: there were many wealthy men who gave their money and time to the Istiqlal, and by no means all of the poor agreed with, or even understood, the party’s program, although the party made constant bids for the favor of the lower classes.

But he would have staked all he possessed on his conviction that these few men he saw now taking their quick dainty steps along the streets of Guerniz were afraid—afraid of what might happen as a result of the present crisis. France might lose part of her power to protect the system under which they lived and prospered. Then thoughtfully he asked himself how he would feel if his father still owned the land at Kherib Jerad, and the orchard by Bab Khokha, and the three houses in the Keddane, if all of that, as well as the oil press and the mill, had not long since been sold and the money spent. While he was posing this question to his conscience and waiting for a reply to come out, his attention was distracted by the sound of wild cheering from the
direction of the Talâa. Where there was a crowd, that was where he wanted to be. Abandoning his decision to use only the back streets, he cut through the nearest alley that led off to his right, and was almost running when he came up against the first bystanders, trying to witness things from a safe distance. He zigzagged ahead until he reached a point where there were so many men packed into the narrow alley that he was unable to push his way further. He could see nothing at all, but he could hear the shouting and singing. Occasionally the men beside him, from whom the procession was likewise hidden, took up a chanted refrain, and filled the small space around them with resonant sound. Not Amar: it would have embarrassed him to open his mouth and shout or sing along with them. It was part of his nature to push his way to the inside and yet at the last moment to remain on the outside. When the time came he always found it difficult to participate; he could only grin and be thrilled by the others. His friends had long ago given up trying to instill in him a sense of teamwork on the soccer field. His principal interest there was in the brilliance of his own plays. Sometimes they would ask him if he thought he were playing alone against both teams. When they complained he would say impatiently:
“Khlass!
Was that a good pass or wasn’t it? Do you want me to play or don’t you? Just tell me that much and then shut up.
Khlass men d’akchi!”