The Spider's House (47 page)

When a silence arrived, he said to Amar: “So the lady knows nothing about the world? What makes you think that?”

“Hada echouf.
You can see she wants to be something powerful in the world. She thinks she can, but that’s because she’s never surrendered.”

“Surrendered? What do you mean?”

“Of course. What is the first duty of everyone in the world? To surrender.
Al Islam! Al Islam!”
He thrust his arms forward (the mud of the Medina was still on his sleeves from his encounter with the police) and bent his head downward in the beginning of a gesture of prostration. Then, continuing, he sketched a series of imaginary instances where the persons involved had or had not submitted to divine authority. In each illustration the accursed person—that is, the unhappy one—saw himself as a being of importance, whereas the blessed and joyous ones had understood that they were nothing at all, that whatever
strength they were able to wield existed only in direct proportion to the degree of their obedience to the inexorable laws of Allah.

To be happy, cease striving and admit you are powerless. Islam, the religion of surrender. It had never occurred to Stenham that the word “Islam” actually meant “surrender.” “I see,” he said aloud.

“Every man you see in the street thinks his life is important,” pursued Amar, warming to his subject, for his own life still seemed terribly important to him, “and he doesn’t want it to stop. But Allah has decreed that each one must lose his life. O
allèche?
Why? To convince men that life isn’t worth anything. No man’s life is worth anything. It’s like the wind.” He blew his breath into the air and made a single clutching motion with his outstretched hand.

“Now, wait,” said Stenham. “You say—”

But Amar would not wait. “Why are we in the world?” he demanded.

Stenham smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that.”

“You don’t know why?” asked Amar sadly. “No.”

Mohammed yawned ostentatiously. “I’ll tell you,” he volunteered. “To talk all night long, while real men are being shot.”

Stenham would have said that a shadow of pain flickered across Amar’s face, but in an instant it was gone, and he continued. “We’re in the world for only one reason, and that’s to act out what was written for us. The man whose destiny is bad, he’s lucky, because all he has to do is give thanks. But the man whose destiny is good—Ay! That’s much harder, because unless he is a very very good man he’ll begin to think he had something to do with his good luck. Don’t you understand?”

“Yes, but perhaps he
did
have something to do with it.” (In such arguments Stenham often found himself unexpectedly extolling the bourgeois virtues.) “If he was good himself, and worked hard—”

“Never!” cried Amar, his eyes blazing. “You’re a Nazarene, a Christian. That’s why you talk that way. If you were a Moslem
and said such things, you’d be killed or struck blind here, this minute. Christians have good hearts, but they don’t know anything. They think they can change what has been written. They’re afraid to die because they don’t understand what death is for. And if you’re afraid to die, then you don’t know what life is for. How can you live?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” Stenham droned amiably. “And I don’t think I ever will know.”

“And the day you do know you’ll come to me and tell me you want to be a Moslem, and we shall all have a great festival for you, because a Nazarene who has become a Moslem is worth more to Allah than a Moslem who was always a Moslem.”

Stenham sighed. “Thank you,” he said. He always thanked them when this point had been reached, for it was a proof of friendship when someone broached the subject of conversion. “I hope some day all that may happen.”

“Incha’Allahr.”

“Let’s go out and watch the dancing,” suggested Stenham, who suddenly felt like cutting the conversation short. It would be a good way, since the noise of the drums and chanting was so loud that talking became an impossibility once one had pushed one’s way into a circle. The two boys jumped up and slipped into their sandals. Stenham rose, stretched, and glancing quickly at Lee to be sure she was still asleep, took his shoes in his hand and tiptoed over to the opening in the tent. “
Nimchi o nji
, I’ll be back,” he told the
qaouaji.

It was the coldest hour of the night. The moon had gone behind the mountain that lay to the west, but a part of the sky there was still bright, and the more distant parts of the countryside continued to bathe in its radiance. The two boys stamped their feet and kicked up their heels in the steps of an improvised dance; this took them along the ground more quickly than Stenham could walk. When they had got ahead some distance he saw Mohammed glance swiftly back, and then put his hand on Amar’s shoulder and say a few words into his ear. He watched Amar to see his reaction, but as far as he could tell there was none. However, he did reply briefly. When they
reached a more crowded crosspath they stood still and waited for Stenham to come abreast of them. He turned his face toward the eastern sky, hunting for a sign of daybreak, but it was not yet due.

“What are they up to?” he wondered with a faint uneasiness. He could not believe that Amar would take part in any sort of craftiness directed at him, but of course Mohammed was an unknown quantity, probably a typical
harami
of Fez, and he did not know the extent of his influence over the other.

It was as if the night, in her death agony, were making a final, desperate effort to assert herself by creating as much darkness as she could. The fires and flares in most of the circles had died, and the sound of the drums coming out of the gloom seemed much louder. Down here in the crease between the two hills, the chill in the air was intense; those who walked had the hoods of their
djellabas
up, so that the principal thoroughfare looked like a dim procession of monks. The smoldering fires gave forth much more smoke than when they had been blazing; one heard constant coughing.

Several smaller circles had formed since he had last come this way. It was difficult to tell what was going on in their midst, or why people crowded in to watch. In one a woman stood perfectly still, her long hair almost completely covering her, making a faint and rhythmical moaning sound; occasionally she seemed to shiver imperceptibly, but Stenham could not be sure. In another, there was an old Negro leaning far forward, his chest propped against a stake that had been driven into the ground. Beside him lay an earthen pot of coals from which rose a sluggish smoke with a foul stench. “What is it?” asked Stenham in a scandalized whisper. “
Fasoukh
. Very good,” Amar told him. “If you wear that in your shoe, even though there’s something buried at the entrance of a house or a café, you’re safe.” “But why do they burn it?” he insisted. “This is a bad hour,” said Amar.

He looked at the old man, and found him vaguely obscene. “What’s he doing?” he whispered. “He’s trying to remember,” Amar whispered back. The man’s eyelids were half open, but
his pupils had rolled quite out of sight, and from time to time his ancient, soft lips moved very slightly to form a word which never came out; instead, a bubble of saliva would slowly form and break. In the front row of spectators, seated, was another very black man wearing a jacket and skullcap entirely sewn with white cowrie-shells. The sounds that came from the flat drum he was languidly beating were his only interest; he listened with complete attention, his eyes closed, his head to one side.
“Nimchiou,”
Stenham muttered, eager to escape the fantastic odor of the smudge rising from the pot of coals. There was a sweet aromatic gum in the substance, but there was also a greasy smell as of burning hair; it was the mixture that was offensive. Even when they had gone well out of its range, the membrane of his throat and nose seemed still coated with the viscid fumes. He spat ferociously. “You don’t like
fasoukh
,” said Amar accusingly. “That means you’re in the power of an evil spirit. No! By Allah!” he cried, as Stenham protested laughingly. “I swear that’s what it means.” “All right,” said Stenham. “A
djinn
lives in me.”

They had come upon another small circle. Here two girls spun silently round and round, their heads and shoulders entirely hidden by pieces of cloth which had been laid over them. No grace was in their movements, no music accompanied them. One would have said that two children had taken it into their heads to see how many times they could turn before they dropped, and that the people had gathered to watch out of sheer inanition. “What is this?” Stenham inquired. “Z
ouamel,”
said Amar softly. So they were not girls at all; they were merely dressed as girls.

They turned to go back to the flatter part of the valley where the large groups were gathered. The exhibits had left Stenham with a faint nausea. The combination of meaninglessness and ugliness bothered him. There had been something definitely repulsive about those little rings of unmoving people. It was not the long-haired woman herself, nor yet the old Negro, and certainly it was not the spectators; the mindless watching of a thing which he felt should have been going on in the strictest
privacy, that was what was upsetting. The world had suddenly seemed very small, cold, and still.

Amar raised his arm and pointed. “The day’s coming,” he said. Stenham could see no light in the sky, but Amar was insistent that it was there. They edged into what looked like the largest of all the circles. In the center, by the light of what remained of a fire, stood a woman all in white, singing. And the chorus of men surrounded her, their arms interlocked, answering at the end of each strophe with a cry like a great gush of water, but one which ended miraculously each time in the same long channel of accurate musical sound, that led to the first note of her next strophe. At this moment it seemed always that they were about to rush in upon her and crush her. Lowering their heads, they would push forward like charging bulls, take three long steps, so that the circle, receding inward from the spectators, became very small; then, while the woman slowly turned like a stately object on a revolving pedestal, they would catch themselves up and pull backward and outward. The very repetitiousness and violence of the dance gave it a hieratic character. The woman’s song, however, could have been a signal called by one mountain wayfarer to another on a distant hill. In certain long notes which lay outside the passage of time because the rhythm was suspended, there was the immeasurable melancholy of mountain twilights. Telling himself it was a beautiful song, he decided to stand still and let it work upon him whatever spell it could. With this music it was senseless to say, because the same thing happened over and over within a piece, that once you knew what was coming next you did not need to listen to the end. Unless you listened to it all, there was no way of knowing what effect it was going to have on you. It might take ten minutes or it might take an hour, but any judgment you passed on the music before it came to its end was likely to be erroneous. And so he stood there, his mind occupied with uncommon, half-formed thoughts. At moments the music made it possible for him to look directly into the center of himself and see the black spot there which was the eternal; at least, that was the way he diagnosed the sensation.
Cogito, ergo sum
is nonsense.
I think
in spite of
being, and I
am
in spite of thinking.

The dark died slowly, fighting to remain, and the light came, at first gray and hideous, and then suddenly, once the sky existed, beautiful and new, and people began surreptitiously to look at one another, to see who had been standing next to them, and the lone woman in the middle became a real woman, but somehow less real for being more than a mask made red by the fire’s light. And as all these things came about, and the sum of the drumming grew less urgent (because so many of the drummers, suddenly realizing that something had changed, and it was daylight now, had ceased pounding on their drums), a strange new sound rose up on all sides to meet the dawn. It was like cockcrow, but it was the voices of the thousands of sheep roundabout, inside the tents, calling to each other, greeting the day on which they were to die for the glory of Allah.

The piece had finished, although there was never any clear-cut end, because the drumming always went on in a desultory fashion through the interlude, until a new piece had begun and had swept it along with it, back into the stream. The woman quietly stepped through the circle of men and disappeared. Stenham glanced at Amar, looked away, and then looked again carefully. There was no doubt about it: tears had wet his cheeks. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the boy become conscious of his surroundings, rub his face with his sleeve, harden his expression, turn a quick hostile glance at Mohammed to reassure himself that the other had not noticed his weakness, and then spit loudly on the ground behind him.

Inwardly Stenham sighed. Even here there existed the unspoken agreement that to be touched by beauty was shameful; one must fight to keep oneself beyond its reach. Nothing was really what he had imagined it to be. In the beginning the Moroccans had been for him an objective force, unrelieved and monolithic. All of them put together made a
thing
, an element both less and more than human; but any one of them alone existed only in so far as he was an anonymous part or a recognizable symbol of that indivisible and undifferentiable total. They were something almost as basic as the sun or the wind,
subject to no moods or impulses started by the mirror of the intellect. They did not know they were there; they merely were there, at one with existence. Nothing could be the result of one individual’s desire, since one was the equivalent of another. Whatever they were and whatever came about was what they all desired. But now, perhaps as a result of having seen this boy, he found himself beginning to doubt the correctness of his whole theoretical edifice.

It was not that what Amar said was different from what so many others had said before him. Probably it was that he said it with such a degree of certainty, and had been so unaffected by the presence of the other culture, rational and deadly, at his side. Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him it was this eternal contradiction which made them Moslems. But Amar’s relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Stenham’s calculations. For Stenham, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations. But in that case the Moroccans were much like anyone else, and very little of value would be lost in the destruction of their present culture, because its design would be worth less than the sum of the individuals who composed it—the same as in any Western country. That, however, he could
not allow himself even to consider; it required too much effort to go on from there, and he had not slept at all during the night.