The Spider's House (39 page)

All at once the car was filled with a sweet smell, like flowers, as the lady opened a small bag she carried with her, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Fez lay far below, wrapped in darkness, its presence betrayed only here and there by a feeble reddish gleam—a lamp in some window or a fire in a courtyard, visible for the fraction of a second as the taxi moved ahead, following the sinuous course of the road along the edge of the cliffs.

They came to the summit, where the ruined tombs of the Merinide royal family looked down across the olive groves and the eastern end of the city. The broken domes stood out black and jagged against the limpid night sky. Amar recalled the last time he had come down these slopes and rounded these curves: he had been on his way home to a beating. He smiled as he remembered how the boy steering the bicycle had misunderstood his query about the brakes, had imagined Amar was afraid it might go off the road, when actually he had been hoping that it would do just that, catapulting them both into a ravine. And he smiled again when he thought of how very seriously he had taken the prospect of that beating, whereas now, he decided, it would mean nothing to him, save the sadness he would feel at being the object of his father’s displeasure, for he had grown up a good deal since then. But had he grown up entirely? For an instant he was sufficiently detached to be able to pose the question. In his pocket was a paper of kif, part of a long-term project of vengeance against Mustapha, in retaliation for that very beating. Would it not be pleasing to Allah if he should suddenly toss it out the window at this moment? But Bab Jamaï then appeared below in a confusion of moving lights, and the thought slipped out of his head to be replaced by the more real preoccupation with what might happen if the police should insist on pulling him from the taxi. This was the most dangerous spot, because it was here that they had to go into the Medina. They had arrived at the gate. The driver came to a halt and shut off the motor. A flashlight was played into their faces and then around the interior of the taxi,
and a French soldier poked his head through the back window, exchanging a few words with the man and the woman.
“Et cet arabe-là,”
he said, indicating Amar with the faintly contemptuous familiarity of proprietorship, “he is your personal servant?” And although Amar did not understand the words, he knew perfectly well what the soldier had said. Both the foreigners replied yes, that was the case.
“Vous pouvez continuer à l’hôtel
,” he told them, and the car started up and went ahead the hundred yards to the hotel gateway.

And then began for Amar a strange series of confused impressions. Led by his new friends, he passed through two small courtyards and up two flights of carpeted stairs to an endless corridor, also carpeted, so that their footsteps made no sound. And there was expensive reed matting covering the walls all along the way, and lanterns overhead such as were found only in the Karouine Mosque or the Zaouia of Moulay Idriss. And then they opened two great doors of glass and went down a few steps into a room which was like nothing he had ever seen, but which, he decided, could not have been made for anyone but a sultan. The intricacies of the high domed ceiling were only faintly illumined by the many-colored rays of light that streamed from the colossal lanterns overhead; it was like being in a vast and perfect cave. He had only a short moment to look around as they crossed the room, and then they were out in another corridor climbing another flight of stairs, this time very old ones of mosaic, and without carpeting—rather like the stairs in his own house, except that the edges of the steps were of white marble instead of wood. The man and woman spoke in low voices as they climbed, Amar behind them. At the top of the stairs there was another corridor, less beautiful than the one below.

Then the man opened a door and they were in the room. “Go in,” he said to Amar, breaking the long silence that had been between them. He spoke to the woman, urging her to enter, too. After some hesitation she finally agreed, and she and the man sat down in two large chairs. Amar remained standing by the door, looking at the magnificent room. “Sit down,” the
man said to him. He obeyed, seating himself on the floor at the spot where he had been standing, and continued his careful examination of the carvings on the beams overhead and the fancy painted plaster frieze of geometric designs. The rugs were thick, the heavy curtains hid the windows, and on the bed the covers had been pulled back to reveal the whiteness of clean sheets.

Now the man looked at him closely for the first time, took out a pack of cigarettes, and after offering the woman one, tossed the pack to Amar. “What’s the matter with your nose and eyes?” he asked him. “Have you had a fight?” Amar laughed and said: “Yes.” He was embarrassed, and he longed to get up and look into the mirror over the washstand, but he sat still and smoked. The man’s manner of casual familiarity with him was assuredly designed to put him at his ease, and he was grateful to him for it; however, the presence of the woman made him nervous. She kept looking at him and smiling in a way that he found disconcerting. It was the way a mother smiles at her small child in a public place when many people are watching and she hopes that it will continue to behave properly. He supposed she meant it to be friendly and reassuring, perhaps even an encouragement, a promise of future intimacy if ever they should find themselves alone. But to him it was a shameless and indecent way for her to behave in front of the man, now that they were all three seated in his bedroom, and he felt that out of deference to his host he should pretend to ignore her smiles. Unfortunately she would have none of this; the less attention he paid her, the more determinedly she kept at him, grimacing, wrinkling her nose at him like a rabbit, blowing smoke toward him as she laughed at things the man said, and generally behaving in an increasingly shocking fashion. And the man went on talking, as if he were completely unaware of what she was doing—not pretending, not indifferent, either, but truly unaware.

Amar was embarrassed for them all, but particularly for the man. He disapproved likewise of the fact that the man and the woman presently embarked on a long and occasionally
stormy conversation regarding him; he knew he was the subject by the glances they gave him while they were talking. Being with them was going to be difficult, he could see that, but he was determined to show a maximum of patience. It was the least he could do in return for having been offered protection, shelter and food in this time of hardship. The discussion appeared to be one concerning food, for suddenly without any pause or transition the man said to him: “Would you mind eating alone in this room?” He answered that he would not mind at all—that, indeed, he thought it the best idea. The man seemed relieved upon hearing his reply, but the woman began to make silly gestures meaning that he ought to go downstairs and eat with them. While she did this the man glowered. Amar had no intention of accompanying them to any public room where he would be on view to the French and the Moroccans who worked in the hotel. He smiled amiably and said: “This is a good room for eating.” For a while the conversation between the two became more animated; then the woman got up petulantly and walked to the door, where she turned and waved coyly at Amar before she went out. The man stepped into the corridor with her for a moment, came back in, and shut the door. His expression was one of annoyance as he took up the telephone and spoke briefly into it.

Amar had been studying the patterns in the rug beside him; he had decided it was the most beautiful object in the room.

When he had hung up the receiver, the man sat down again, heaved a deep sigh, and lit another cigarette. Amar looked up at him.

“Why do you talk so much with that woman?” he said, the expression of his voice a mixture of shyness and curiosity. “Words are for people, not for women.”

The man laughed. “Aren’t women people?” he asked.

“People are people,” Amar said stolidly. “Women are women. It’s not the same thing.”

The man looked very surprised, and laughed more loudly. Then his face became serious; he leaned forward in the chair. “If
women aren’t people,” he said slowly, “how does it happen they can go to Paradise?”

Amar looked at him suspiciously: the man could scarcely be that ignorant. But he could discern no mockery in his face.
“El hassil
,” he began, “they have their own place in Heaven. They don’t go inside where the men are.”

“I see,” the man said gravely. “It’s like the mosques, is that it?”

“That’s it,” said Amar, still wondering if the man might not be making fun of him.

“You must know a lot about your religion,” the man said dreamily. “I wish you’d tell me something about it.”

Now Amar was convinced that he was being baited. He gave a short, bitter laugh. “I don’t know anything,” he said. “I’m like an animal.”

The man raised his eyebrows. “Nothing at all? But you should. It’s a very good religion.”

Amar was displeased. He studied the face of this patronizing infidel for a moment. “It’s the
only
one,” he said evenly. Then he smiled. “But now we are all like animals. Just look in the streets, see what’s happening here. Don’t you think it’s the Moslems’ fault?”

The man’s swift glance told him that he was awakening some sort of respect. “The Moslems have some blame,” he said quietly, “but I think the great blame goes to the French. You don’t judge a man too harshly for what he does to an intruder he finds in his house, do you?”

Now Amar was about to reply: “Allah sees everything,” but a voice in his head was whispering to him that it was not the sort of remark the Nazarene would really hear. If he wanted to keep alive the spark of respect he felt he had kindled, he must work hard inside himself. “The French are thieves in our house, you’re right,” he agreed. “We invited them in because we wanted to take lessons from them. We thought they’d teach us. They haven’t taught us anything—not even how to be good thieves. So we want to put them out. But now they think the
house is theirs, and that we’re only servants in it. What can we do except fight? It is written.”

“Do you hate them?” the man asked; he was leaning forward, looking at Amar with intensity. There was no one there but the two of them; if the man turned out to be a spy he would at least have no witnesses. But that was an extreme consideration: Amar was positive he was only an onlooker. “Yes, I hate them,” he said simply. “That’s written, too.”

“You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?”

Amar did not completely understand. “But I hate them now,” he explained. “The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He’ll change my heart.”

The man was smiling, as if to himself. “If the world’s really like that, it’s very easy to be in it,” he said.

“It will never be easy to be in the world,” Amar said firmly. “Er
tabi mabrhach.
God doesn’t want it easy.”

The man did not answer. Soon he rose, went to the open window, and stood looking down at the dark Medina below. When he turned back into the room, he began to speak as though there had been no break in the conversation. “So you hate them,” he mused. “Would you like to kill them?”

This immediately put Amar on his guard. “Why do you ask me all these questions?” he said aggrievedly. “Why do you want to know about me? That’s not good at a time like now.” He tried to keep his face empty of expression, so that it would not look as though he were indignant, but apparently his effort was not completely successful, for the man sat back and launched into a long apology, making a good many errors in Arabic, so that Amar often was not certain what it was he was trying to tell him. The recurrent motif of this speech, however, was that the Nazarene was not attempting to pry into Amar’s life in any way, but only to learn about what was happening in the city. To Amar this was a most implausible explanation; if it were the truth, why did the man keep asking him for his personal opinion?

“What I think about the trouble is less than the wind,” he finally said with a certain bitterness. “I can’t even read or write my own name. What good could I be to anybody?” But even this confession, with all it cost him to make it, seemed not to convince the man, who, rather than accepting it and letting the matter drop, seemed positively delighted to learn of Amar’s shame. “Aha!” he cried. “I see! I see! Very good! Then you have nothing to fear from anyone.”

This remark Amar found particularly disturbing, for it must mean that he was going to send him away. The Nazarene had understood nothing at all; Amar’s spirits sank as he perceived the gap that lay between them. If a Nazarene with so much good will and such a knowledge of Arabic was unable to grasp even the basic facts of such a simple state of affairs, then was there any hope that any Nazarene would ever aid any Moslem? And yet a part of his mind kept repeating to him that the man could be counted on, that he could be a true friend and protector if only he would let himself be shown how.

They continued to talk, but the conversation was now like a game in which the players, through fatigue or lack of interest, have ceased to keep the score, or even to pay attention to the sequence of plays. The point of contact was gone; they seemed to be looking in different directions, trying to say separate things, giving different meanings to words. Mercifully, a knock came at the door, and the man sprang to open it. The woman stood there, dressed in a more seemly manner this time, and looking very pleased with herself. In she came, down she sat, and then on and on she talked, while Amar’s boredom and hunger grew. When there was another knock at the door, he rose, swiftly crossed the room, and managed to be at the window, leaning over the balcony, when the servant came in carrying his tray, and he remained there until he had heard him go out and shut the door behind him. His eyes having grown used to the dark as he stood there, he was able to find, among the thousands of cubes which were the houses in the dimness below, the mosque that stood on the hill at the back of his house. And
off in the east, behind the barren mountains, there was a glow in the clear sky which meant that the moon would shortly be arriving.