The Spider's House (11 page)

Mohammed sat up and looked across the water. The country boy was wandering among the rocks over which he had spread his pieces of clothing, feeling them to see if they were dry. Mohammed went on looking, his eyes very narrow. Finally he glanced up at Amar.

“Let’s swim across and have some fun with him,” he suggested. And as Amar did not respond, he continued: “If you’ll hold him for me I’ll hold him for you.”

The words that came out escaped from Amar’s lips before he had formed them in his mind. “I’ll hold your mother for you,” he said viciously, without looking down at him.

Mohammed leapt to his feet.
“Kifach?”
he cried. “What was that?” His eyes were rolling; he looked like a maniac.

Now Amar looked at him, calmly, although his heart had more sharp points than ever, and he was breathing fast. “I said I’d hold your mother for you. But only if you’ll hold your sister for me.”

Mohammed could not believe his ears. And even when he reminded himself that Amar had said it twice, so that there could be no doubt, he still had no immediate reflex. There seemed to be no possible gesture to make: they were standing
too close together, their faces and bodies almost touching. Accordingly Mohammed stepped backward, but lost his balance, and fell into the shallow water at the foot of the rocks. Amar sprang after him, conscious of being still in the air as Mohammed’s back hit the surface of the water, and conscious, an instant later, of having landed more or less astride Mohammed’s belly, which was only slightly submerged. Mohammed was bubbling and groaning, trying to lift his head above the water; the water was so shallow that he had hit the stones. Amar stood up; Mohammed staggered to his feet, covered with mud, and still wailing. Then with a savage cry he lunged at Amar, and the two fell together back into the water. This time it was Amar’s turn to have his head pounded upon the bed of the lake. Pebbles, stiff, slippery leaves and rotten sticks were ground against his face; the world was a chaotic churning of air and water, light and darkness. He felt Mohammed’s hard weight pushing him down—an elbow here, a knee there, a hand on his throat. He relaxed a second, then put all his effort into a rebound which partially dislodged Mohammed’s grip. Twice he drove his fist up into Mohammed’s belly as hard as he could, managing to lift his head above the water and breathe once. Drawing his leg back, he delivered a kick which reached a soft part of Mohammed’s body. A second later they were both on their feet, each one conscious only of the eyes, nose and mouth of the other. Now it was merely a matter of perseverance. Amar’s fist went well into the socket of Mohammed’s left eye. “Son of gonorrhea!” Mohammed bellowed. Almost at the same instant Amar had the impression that he had run headlong into a wall of rocks. The pain was just below the bridge of his nose. He choked, knew it was blood running down his throat, recoiled and spat what he had collected of it into Mohammed’s face, hitting him just below the nose. Then he rammed his head into Mohammed’s stomach, knocking him backwards, and following through with another, better planned blow with the top of his head which sent Mohammed sprawling on the muddy ground of the shore. He leapt, sat once more astride him and pounded his face with all his might. At first Mohammed made powerful efforts to rise,
then his resistence lessened, until eventually he was merely groaning. Still Amar did not stop. The blood that poured from his nose had run down his own body onto Mohammed’s head and chest.

When he was positive that Mohammed was not merely playing a trick in order to lunge at him unexpectedly, he got unsteadily to his feet and gave the boy’s head a terrific kick with his bare heel. He had to keep sniffing to keep the blood from coming out his nostrils; the thought came to him that he had better wash himself.

He squatted a few meters out from the shore and bathed hurriedly, constantly glancing back to be sure that Mohammed was still lying in the same position. The cold water seemed to be stanching the bleeding, and he continued to splash handfuls of it into his face, snuffing it up his nose. When he went back to dress he stopped and knelt down beside Mohammed. Seen this way, his features in repose, the downy tan skin of his face looking very soft where it showed among the smears of blood and dirt, he was not hateful. But what a difference there was between what Amar could see now of Mohammed and what Mohammed was like inside! It was a mystery. He had been going to bang his head against the ground, but now he no longer wanted to, because Mohammed was not there; it was a stranger lying naked before him. He got up and went to dress. Without looking back again, he led his bicycle out to the road, got on, and rode away. When the gradient got too steep he had to walk.

The eucalyptus grove seemed even more silent than it had a while ago. At the top, as he was about to emerge onto the long straight road across the plain, he imagined he heard a voice calling from below. It was hard to tell; what would Mohammed be calling him for? He stood still and listened. Certainly someone was shouting in the grove, but far away. The voice sounded hollow and distorted. And he still would have said that it was saying his name, save that it was inconceivable under the circumstances that Mohammed should do such a thing. Or perhaps not; perhaps he had no money and was more frightened of
facing the Frenchman in the bicycle shop than he was ashamed of calling out to Amar. In any case, Amar was not going to wait and see. Feeling perverse and unhappy, he mounted the bicycle again and sped off under the noonday sun, back toward the city.

CHAPTER 7

Like most of the boys and younger men who had been born in Fez since the French had set up their rival Fez only a few kilometers outside the walls, Amar had never formed the habit of going to a mosque and praying. For all but the well-to-do, life had become an anarchic, helter-skelter business, with people leaving their families and going off to other cities to work, or entering the army where they were sure to eat. Since it is far more sinful to pray irregularly than not to pray at all, they had merely abandoned the idea of attempting to live like their elders, and trusted that in His all-embracing wisdom Allah would understand and forgive. But often Amar was not sure; perhaps the French had been sent as a test of the Moslems’ faith, like a plague or a famine, and Allah was watching each man’s heart closely, to see whether he was truly keeping the faith. In that case, he told himself, how irate He must be by this time, seeing into what evil ways His people had fallen. There were moments when he felt very far from Allah’s grace, and this was one of them, as he pedaled at top speed through the dried-up fields, with the huge sun above his head sending down its deadly heat upon him.

He knew that Mohammed had been at fault, but only in a way he could not help—only for being Mohammed; whereas he himself was truly to blame for wanting Mohammed to be something
other than what it had been written that he must be. He knew that no man could be changed by anyone but Allah, yet he could not prevent himself from feeling resentful that Mohammed had not turned out to be the possible friend he was looking for, in whom he could confide, who could understand him.

Djebel Zalagh was there ahead of him, behind the invisible Medina, looking not very imposing from this angle—merely a higher part of the long ridge that seemed to continue indefinitely from one side of the horizon to the other. And in the heat haze today, it had no color but gray, a dead color, like ashes. The Arab city of course could not be seen because it was built in what was really a wide crevasse below the plateau of the plain; its position made it warmer in the winter, because it was sheltered from the icy winds that swept across the plain, and cooler in summer, because the merciless rays of the sun did not strike it with quite so much force. Then, too, the river coursed in countless channels through the ravine on whose slopes the Medina was built, and that helped to cool the air. The inhabitants were fond of pointing out to one another, as well as to visitors, the insufferable climate of the Ville Nouvelle, for the French had built their city squarely in the plain, and as a consequence it was open to all the excesses of the intemperate Moroccan weather. Amar could not understand how anyone, even the French, could be so stupid as to waste so much money building so large a city when it could never be any good, since the land on which it was built was worthless in the beginning. He had been there in the winter and felt the blasts of bitterly cold wind that rushed through the wide streets; nowhere in the world, he was sure, could the air be more inhospitable and unsuited for human beings to live in. “It’s poison,” he would report when he returned to the Medina from a trip to the Ville Nouvelle. And in the summer, in spite of the trees they had planted along their avenues, the air was still and breathless, and at the end of each street you saw the dead plain there, baking in the terrible sunlight.

Far ahead he could see the white spots that were the new
city’s apartment houses; they looked like bird droppings piled in the immensity of the plain. “All that will disappear in one night,” he thought, to reassure himself. It had been written that the works of the unbelievers were to be destroyed. But when? He wanted to see the flames soaring into the sky and hear the screams, he longed to walk through the ruins while they were still glowing, and feel the joy that comes from knowing that evil is punished in this world as well as in the next, that justice and truth must prevail on earth as well as hereafter.

This was the hour when no one was abroad; he had not met a soul since leaving Aïn Malqa. One would have said that the earth had been deserted by mankind and left to the insects, which screamed their song in praise of heat as he sped along—one endless shrill fierce note that rose on all sides, perpetually renewed.

His nose had started to bleed again, not so profusely as before, but dripping regularly every three or four pedals; it was beginning to feel as wide as his head, and painful. He stopped, knelt down by the channel of water beside the road, and bathed his face. The water was cold; he did not remember it as being that deliciously cold. He took a deep breath, bent far over, and submerged his head; the force of the current made the flesh of his cheeks vibrate. When he had finished his ablutions and immersions he felt refreshed and relaxed. Feeling that way made him want to rest a bit. He stood up and scanned the plain for a tree, but there was none, and so he went on. A few kilometers further ahead he caught sight of a mass of green a good distance away on his left. It looked like a small fruit orchard, and there was a lane leading across the fields toward the spot. He turned off. The lane was bumpy and hard to ride on; he managed however to make slow progress without having to get down. If he had had to walk, he would have considered that it was not worth his while to make the side trip. The orchard proved to be larger and more distant than he had thought. It lay in a slight depression; what he had seen from the road was only the tops of the trees, and as he approached they grew taller. Such a wealth of
green meant the presence of underground springs. “Olives, pears, pomegranates, quinces, lemons …” he murmured as he entered the orchard.

At that moment he heard ahead of him the sound of an approaching motorcycle. The idea had not crossed his mind that the land might have a house on it, that the house might be inhabited, but now it did occur to him, the hypothesis made more unpleasant by his suspicion that the inhabitants were likely to be French, in which case they would either beat him, shoot him, or turn him over to the police, the last possibility being the most fearsome. It was a very bad thing to be caught on a Frenchman’s farm at any time, but particularly now, when for the past few weeks hundreds of
domaines
had been raided by the Istiqlal and the crops set afire.

Quickly he leapt to the ground, and lifting the bicycle, began to run clumsily with it among the trees, looking for a place to hide. But it was a well-tended orchard, without bushes or undergrowth, and he could see that his project was absurd: he would have had to run very far in order not to be seen, if the cyclist happened to be looking his way as he passed. And the noise was already very loud, almost upon him. He turned, set the bicycle down, and walked slowly back. When the motorcycle appeared he had almost reached the lane. The rider, a small, plump man wearing goggles and a visored cap, was bouncing uncomfortably as the machine veered from one old rut to another, hitting clods of earth that were like rocks. As he came along, he was looking straight at Amar; he stopped, let the motor idle an instant, then turned it off. The sudden silence was astonishing, but then it proved not to be silence at all; there were the cicadas singing in the trees.

“Msalkheir
,” the man said, carefully removing his cap, then his goggles, and never taking his eyes from Amar’s face. “Where are you going, and where are you coming from?”

“Taking a walk,” said Amar. “Looking for a tree to lie under.” He had decided that the man was a Moslem (not because he spoke perfect Arabic, for some Frenchmen could do that, but
because of his manner and the way in which he spoke), and that relieved his anxiety to such an extent that he found himself telling him the simple truth.

“Taking a walk with a bicycle?” The man laughed, not unpleasantly, but in a way that meant he did not believe a word Amar had said.

“Yes,” Amar said. Then a drop of blood fell from his nose, and he realized that his shirt was decorated with red spatters of it.

“What’s the matter?” asked the man. “What happened to your face? Did you fall off the bicycle?”

It was too late to do any lying now, Amar reflected ruefully. “No, I had a fight. With a friend,” he added quickly, lest the man might suppose that his fight had been with one of the workmen or one of the guards on the property.

The man laughed again. He had a round face with large mild eyes, and he was growing bald. “A fight? And where’s the friend? Lying dead somewhere in my orchard?” In the man’s eyes Amar could distinguish nothing beyond an interested amusement.