The Spider's House (51 page)

Where were they going and what did they intend to do when they got there? Not one of them could have answered the question, nor could the question have been posed; it would not have been in key with the prevailing temper, more suited to the chanting of prayers than to the elaboration of projects. They knew that if an angel were to appear suddenly in the sky above the fruit orchards they were passing, and were to give them the clear choice between renouncing their vows of vengeance and dying, they would gladly give up their lives then and there, rather than betray their brothers in Islam. But no angel came, and they were not far from the city walls.

Alone among all the passengers Amar was working out a plan of action: no one but he had a mother and sister in the Medina. The mountain men’s vested interest in the holiness of the city provided them with excitement, but it was excitement of the sort that comes when many people make a common decision to defend a cause, and it awakened none of the desperate intelligence of the individual who finds himself in extremities. Mohammed’s family had gone to Casablanca to pass the Aid there with relatives, and he was staying with a married sister in Fez-Djedid outside the walls, which meant that not only was he free from worries about the possible fate of his mother and sisters at the hands of the partisans, but could come and go as he pleased. This explained, even if it did not excuse, his obvious lack of interest in Amar’s predicament. All he wanted was his bicycle money, and that Amar intended to give him as soon as he had a minute to hide himself and count it out; he would hand it to
him and say good-bye, for he wanted to get rid of him before he set to work.

They were approaching the big curve by Bab Jamaï, which brought the road up out of the orchards to within a few meters of the walls, and then swung it immediately away again, out onto the stony mountainside. Several hundred soldiers were there, moving about among the tents that had been hastily set up along the outside of the ramparts. But the pilgrims looked straight ahead, chanting with ferocity, and pounded the sides of the bus and the seats. On up the hill they went, their clear voices floating out over the empty cemeteries. When they got to the top, Amar could not keep from stealing a glance down at the Medina. No columns of smoke rose from its midst; it looked the same as every other day. The Nazarene gentleman had told him that the Istiqlal spread many lies. He knew that; everyone told lies. It was for the intelligent man to distinguish truth from lies, just as it was only the intelligent man who knew how to lie in a way that made it next to impossible for others to find his lies and identify them as such. As he looked at the Medina stretched out down there in the glaring sun, unchanged, it occurred to him to question the truth of what they had said, but only for an instant. If it were not yet true, it soon would be. His problem was to get home, if possible before it was too late, but in any case to get there.

The road now straightened out; the little truck ahead with its load of watermelons went faster. Again there were tents along the walls, between Casbah Cherarda and Bab Segma. The men from the mountains sang out into the surprised, slow faces of the Senegalese soldiers. No one halted the bus, and it sped ahead toward the west, along the Meknès road.

They stopped a few meters off the side road in a lane with high cane on either side. Quickly everyone got out. The four men of the truck were in a frenzy of anxiety. “Hurry! Hurry!” they cried, suddenly having exhausted the courage which had made it possible for them to go to the rescue of the lost bus. Without thinking, they had driven into the lane to show the way; now they were obliged to wait until the bus had backed out
to the road, before they themselves could get out. “Quick!” And it was a bad moment when an old man fell flat on his face and had to be helped up, dusted off and set straight.

When Amar’s feet touched the ground and he became aware of the familiar odor of the river, he felt all at once as though he had been away from home a very long time, and his sense of urgency redoubled. It was as if he had been asleep, and had awakened. His patience with the pilgrims was at an end; they were moving ineffectually around the bus in a dazed fashion because the chanting was over and their minds were still in it, but at any moment someone might come along the road and turn into the lane. “Come on,” he said to Mohammed, and they started back to the road.

“But where are we going?” Mohammed wanted to know.

“I’m going to see a friend of mine, and I’m going alone.”

“And my money?” cried Mohammed.

Amar was delighted. It was exactly the reaction he had been hoping for. This would make it easy to pay him off and dismiss him without ceremony. “
Ah
,
khlass
!” he said, making a show of disgust. “Your money! All you have in your head is your money.” He was looking for a stretch of wall or cactus fence, something to go behind for a moment, and until he found it he would have to improvise a critical lecture on Mohammed’s cupidity. Finally he caught sight of an abandoned hut ahead; when they had reached it, he said: “Wait a second.” He could see that Mohammed was loath to let him out of his sight, for fear he would bolt without paying him, but he could scarcely follow him into the hut, where he was going ostensibly to relieve himself. There was daylight inside: long ago the roof had fallen. He pulled out his money and counted it. The Nazarene lady had been generous even beyond his expectations: there were eight thousand-franc and two five-hundred-franc notes. He looked down at them with love. “Mine,” he thought, and then he corrected himself. “
Jiaou.
They came. It was written.” It was for this that Allah had decreed the man should take him away from the café, feed him and protect him. True, there was another part to it somewhere, that had to do with friendship and the man’s own understanding of him,
but it was too difficult to reach with his mind now, and he did not insist upon it. He folded the money carefully and put it away again. Then he took two hundred francs out of the handkerchief in which his own money was tied and put it loose into his other pocket. When he came out, Mohammed was standing there, looking anxiously toward the door, as if he were afraid Amar might simply vanish. This was a mystery Amar had never been able to fathom. The rich were not ashamed to let it be seen that they cared about money. Where a man with only twenty rial in the world would as a matter of course use those twenty rial to pay for all the teas at the table, another with a thousand rial in his wallet, when the time came to leave the café, would begin to fumble inside his clothing and murmur aloud: “Let’s see, there are six people at fifteen francs each, that’s eighteen rial. I have only fifteen francs change, which is exactly my share. Each one had better pay his own.” For the poor man such behavior was unthinkable: his shame would be so great he could never face his friends again. But the rich gave it no importance. “That will all change when the French leave,” Amar was fond of thinking. The concept of independence was easily confused with that of social equity.

They walked along briskly, Amar apparently having forgotten the monologue he had been delivering. To Mohammed this meant he had forgotten the money once more, and he was rash enough to mention it. Amar stopped walking, reached into his pocket, and pulled out the two hundred francs. Without saying anything he put it into Mohammed’s hand. They took a few more steps. “Happy?” asked Amar with what he considered delicate irony. Mohammed seemed shamed into silence.

When they came to a dirt road leading off across the fields to the south, Amar stood still again and said firmly: “I’ll see you some day soon.
B’slemah
.” Mohammed merely looked at him. That was the world, Amar thought as he walked away. He had been willing to make him his friend, and Mohammed lacked the sense to realize it. He had even given him a second chance, which Mohammed had likewise disregarded. It was all really very fortunate, he reflected, for now he had complete freedom of
movement, whereas Mohammed’s presence would surely have hampered him.

He looked back twice, just to be sure Mohammed had really continued along the other road; the first time he was still standing there, as if he were debating whether to follow him and try to get more money, but the second time he had already gone some distance down the road toward the city.

The fields were parched; only a dead yellow stubble covered their cracked earth. But insects whirred and buzzed in the weeds that edged the lane, and where there was a tree there were birds. When a man was extremely thirsty the sound of a bird singing was like a little stream of water trickling from the sky. His father had told him that, but he could not see that the birds were of any help now. Or perhaps they were; perhaps his thirst would have been stronger without them.

An hour or so later he came upon the cut-off he had been looking for—a path that led straight across the open plain between stiff-speared agaves, to the Aïn Malqa road. The distances were big out here; things looked near and small, but they were always larger and further away than one thought. It was the golden hour of the afternoon where he reached the olive grove. This time no motorcycle appeared, and he arrived at the house without disturbing the fabric of cricket-songs through which he walked. For a moment he stood by the door doing nothing, reluctant to bang the knocker. But having come all the way here, he was unable to think of anything else to do, and so he lifted the iron ring and let it fall, twice. The sound was surprisingly loud, but immediately after it the calm was there again, unchanged. He listened intently for voices inside. The crickets were too loud.

He waited a long time. If no one answered, he was prepared to sit at some distance from the house in the bushes and go on waiting there, until Moulay Ali returned. From where he stood, he surveyed the overgrown garden, selecting and rejecting vantage points. There was a click behind him, and he wheeled about. The door was open just far enough to let a nose and mouth be seen in the aperture. “Mahmoud?” he asked hesitantly,
his voice breaking on the second syllable, as it still did sometimes when he put insufficient force behind it. The name had come to him that instant, as he had said it. But whoever it was softly closed the door, and he was alone again. And now he waited even longer, but with the knowledge that at least someone was in, even though there was no more sound inside or out of the house than as if it had been a ruin. In the grove a bird called repeatedly, two clear notes, a silence, two clear notes.

CHAPTER 31

This time the door really opened, very quickly, and a tall man with a gray
tarbouche
and one white eye stood there, holding a large, bright revolver which was leveled straight at Amar’s chest.

“Good afternoon,” said the man, and on hearing the deep voice Amar remembered his name, too.

“Yah, Lahcen, chkhbarek?
How are you?” he began, a little too familiarly, he realized, as the big man’s expressionless face did not alter.

“Come in,” Lahcen said, stepping aside, following Amar’s movements with the gun. “I wonder if he thinks I’m afraid of that,” Amar was asking himself. He heard Lahcen bolting the door as he started up the stairs. When they were up on the gallery they did not go into the large room where he had been before, but walked its battered length, the droning of bees above their heads, to a small door at the far end. “Open it,” said Lahcen.

There were three steps leading down onto another gallery which ran at right angles with the first. This part of the house
was even more dilapidated than the other: the floor tiles were almost all missing, the walls had partially crumbled and fallen, and some of the ceiling beams, rotted away at the outer edge, sagged so low that they had to bend their heads as they passed. Now Lahcen stepped ahead and opened a door on the right. It was dim inside; there was only one small window which had been covered over with a sheet of yellowed newspaper, and in the air was the still heat of a closed-up room in summer, the dry, blind smell of slowly accumulating dust. Lahcen shut the door and Amar heard his slightly labored breathing as he brushed past him.

Suddenly there was light. A door directly in front of Amar had opened. Moulay Ali stood there in a green silk dressing gown, his hand on the doorknob. Behind him was a flight of narrow wooden stairs leading up, or so it looked, to the sky.

“El aidek mebrouk.
Holiday greetings,” said Moulay Ali pleasantly, with no trace of irony. “Come up.” He turned and mounted the stairs ahead of Amar, and Lahcen came behind him.

It was the sky that Amar had seen; the sky was all the way around the room, because the walls were made entirely of windows. Some were open and some were shut, and there in the dying sunlight were the mountains, the plain, the tops of the olive trees below, and on the front side only the roof of the house, which was built up higher than the room. Amar looked around delightedly, very much impressed. Moulay Ali watched him. The only furnishings were a large table and some heavy leather hassocks to sit on. The table was littered at one end with books, magazines and newspapers; at the other end there was a typewriter.

“Sit down. How do you like my workroom?”

“Never in the world have I seen such a room,” Amar told him, glancing sideways toward Lahcen, who had sat leaning against the door, his revolver still in his hand. Moulay Ali noticed his wandering gaze and laughed.

“Lahcen’s my bodyguard this afternoon. For once I think I
have one I can trust.” Lahcen grunted complacently. ‘The others all went singing their little songs to their friends.”

“You mean to the police?” said Amar, scandalized.

Still Moulay Ali studied him, his head slightly to one side. He smiled. “No,” he said calmly. “But they talked too much, and that’s almost as bad. You see, I’m not here today. You think you see me, but I’m really in Rabat.” Suddenly he changed the tone of his voice and said, somewhat menacingly, Amar thought: “But what’s all this about the police? Why would anyone go to the police? Why did you say that? You’ll have to explain that to me, I’m afraid. I don’t understand.”