The Spider's House (16 page)

Benani’s lip curled scornfully before he said: “No. He won’t be there. He has to study. These are older
drari!.”

He’s trying to flatter me, Amar decided. He knows I’m Mokhtar’s age. Still, he was curious to see why, and so he stood there.

“I’ve got to go home,” he said. He knew that if his suspicion were correct, now would begin the cajoling, the pressing of the arm, the faint tugs at the sleeve and lapel.

He was quite right: all this did happen, and presently he found himself wandering slowly along the interminable dark street with him, downhill, downward, down, firm now in his conviction that Benani wanted something very definite from him.

CHAPTER 11

The café was like any other large street café in the Medina: bare and uncomfortable, with tables that rocked on their unequal legs, and chairs that threatened to collapse under the weight of the sitter. The plaster on the walls had been clumsily splashed with pink and blue paint to give a marbled effect; in many places it had cracked and fallen, and the mud of the outer wall was visible.

There were six of them. They had brought bread and olives with them, and now they sent out for skewers of lamb. At first they sat at a table near the
qaouaji’s
booth, where the charcoal fire occasionally showered them with sparks. When the skewers of
qotbanne
arrived, they moved in a body to a small niche in the back which had no table and no chairs—only a width of matting on the floor and another strip around the walls. They exactly filled the niche, with two sitting along each side, and a newspaper spread out in the center.

The shameful problem of the sailor doll had been settled while Amar and Benani were still alone together. Mercifully Allah had decreed that Benani was to stop at a latrine halfway down the hill; Amar had seized that moment to fling it up into the network of rafters in the ceiling of the edifice, and it had flopped over one of them and stuck there. It was certain Benani had noticed that he had been carrying something, for Amar caught him looking surreptitiously toward the hand which he still held behind him as they emerged from the latrine. But now Benani could surmise as much as he liked; it did not matter.

The others were indeed older than Amar by a few years, all of them being seventeen or over. However, from the beginning they had been civil with him and had made an obvious effort to put him at his ease—an effort which was not entirely successful,
since he could not help feeling out of place among them, yet being both flattered by and suspicious of their attention. It was Benani who sat beside him and joked with him; he seemed to have taken it upon himself to play the role of apologist for Amar that evening. If Amar made a remark with which the others appeared not to sympathize, he would either question Amar in order to get him to go on and be more explicit, or he would give them his own explanation of Amar’s words. Unfortunately this seemed destined to happen again and again; although they all understood and spoke the same dialect, and used the same symbols of reference, it was as if they had come from separate countries.

The difference was principally in the invisible places toward which their respective hearts were turned. They dreamed of Cairo with its autonomous government, its army, its newspapers and its cinema, while he, facing in the same direction, dreamed just a little beyond Cairo, across the Bhar el Hamar to Mecca. They thought in terms of grievances, censorship, petitions and reforms; he, like any good Moslem who knows only the tenets of his religion, in terms of destiny and divine justice. If the word “independence” was uttered, they saw platoons of Moslem soldiers marching through streets where all the signs were written in Arabic script, they saw factories and power plants rising from the fields; he saw skies of flame, the wings of avenging angels, and total destruction. Slowly Benani became aware of this vast disparity, and secretly began to despair. However, his task for the evening was not that of trying to reconcile two points of view; it was something quite distinct from that. He knew that the others had completely lost patience with him for bringing them together with this ignoramus, this anomalous shadow from the world of yesterday; they felt that he should have taken care of him by himself. But he was convinced that it was his duty to conduct the gathering in the way he believed best.

“Yah, Abdelkader!” he called. “Let’s have a Coca-Cola.”

The
qaouaji
arrived with a bottle.

“Is it cold?” demanded Benani.

“Hah! It’s cold and a half,” the
qaouaji
informed him.

Benani took the bottle and offered it first to Amar. “Have a little,” he urged him. As Amar tipped the bottle to his lips, Benani said to him casually: “Played any soccer recently?” Amar swallowed and said he had not. “Been swimming?” pursued Benani. “Today,” Amar said, passing the bottle back to him. “A lot of people at Sidi Harazem?” Benani inquired. Amar said he had not been there. He decided to sit back and enjoy himself. The others with their sudden silence and watchful eyes had given the show away. He would offer no information except that explicitly demanded by Benani, and then he would confuse him by telling the truth. Nothing could be more upsetting, because one always judiciously mixed false statements in with the true, the game being to tell which were which. It was axiomatic that a certain percentage of what everyone said had to be disbelieved. If he made nothing but strictly true statements, Amar told himself, Benani would necessarily be at a disadvantage, for he would be bound to doubt some of them.

As he had foreseen, the casual conversation quickly turned into a grilling as Benani lost first his poise and then, at least partly, his temper.

“Oh, so you went to Aïn Malqa. I see.”

“Yes.”

“Then you came back.”

Amar looked surprised. “Yes.”

“You were just getting back when I met you?”

“No. I was at the
fechtet.”

“That doesn’t start until eight,” Benani said in an accusatory tone.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there very long.”

“You must have stayed late at Aïn Malqa.”

“Not very. The sun was on top when I left.”

Benani took a gulp of Coca-Cola and passed the bottle on to the boy on his right. Then he whistled for a moment, as if that little interlude might give the scene a semblance of naturalness.

“You must have stopped to sleep on the way back,” he said presently.

Amar laughed. “No. I was looking for a place, but I couldn’t find one. I got into somebody’s orchard by mistake.”

“Ay! That was dangerous. The French are shooting fast these days.”

If he lied and pretended to have met no one and seen nothing, they would be convinced that he had understood more than he really had. The important thing was not to seem to have noticed anything very unusual about Moulay Ali.

“It wasn’t a French orchard. It belonged to a Moslem.”

“A Moslem?” echoed Benani in a tone of disbelief. “On the Aïn Malqa road?”

“You know, a Moslem with a motorcycle. Moulay Somebody. A little bald, and walks like an owl.”

One of the boys laughed briefly. Benani winced with annoyance, but did not turn his head. Instead, he shut his eyes, as if he were trying to place the man.

“Moulay Somebody,” repeated Amar.

Benani shook his head. “I don’t know him,” he said uncertainly.

“He lives in an old house.”

“With his family?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you go inside?”

“Oh, yes. He invited me in…. Look,” said Amar suddenly. “If you want to know who was there and what they were doing, why don’t you go and ask him?”

“Who, me?” Benani cried. “I don’t know him. Why would I know him?”

“Khlass
!” said Amar, smiling tolerantly. “You know him better than I do.” And taking an even greater chance, he continued. “And you saw him tonight.”

The others all sat up just a little straighter at that instant. Amar was delighted. He decided to try to clean up the disorder of the conversation.

“I can’t tell you anything about your friend because I don’t know him. But you don’t want to know about him, anyway. You want to know about me.
Zduq
, ask me more questions.”

“Don’t be angry,” said Benani. Amar laughed. “We’re all friends. What difference does it make whose orchard you went into? He wasn’t French and he didn’t shoot you. That’s the important thing.”

It was as though Amar had said nothing; he saw that they were not going to be honest with him, and he wondered if it would give him a greater advantage to go on being honest with them, or whether he should stop and begin to play the game their way. He decided to go on a little further.

“At first I thought you spoke to me because you’d heard what I was saying in the Talâa, when I was talking to myself.”

“Would that be a reason?” asked Benani.

So he did hear me, thought Amar, feeling more satisfaction at having discovered the truth about that. “It might be,” he replied.

“Enta hmuq bzef
,” Benani said disgustedly. “You’re crazy.” One of the boys was whispering in the ear of another. The latter, whose face was bursting with very red pimples, suddenly spoke up. “At first you thought that, you say. But what do you think now?” Benani looked angrily at him; Amar hazarded the guess that it was because he had not managed to ask him that himself. He glanced out into the café. The place was empty. The
qaouaji
had shut the door and lay asleep in front of it. He looked at the faces of the five older boys and saw no friendliness in them.

“El hassil
,” he said slowly. “I don’t know what to think.”

He could not go on being truthful now; it was out of the question, because what he saw with complete clarity was that not only had Moulay Ali sent Benani after him to investigate him—he had instructed him to do it in the manner of the police; that is, without divulging anything on his side and using any means he saw fit, as long as he extracted the information. Benani had played his part too crudely for there to be any room for doubt. Probably more than anything Moulay Ali wanted to know what he had heard out there in the orchard house, how much he had understood and deduced, and whether he was going to hold his tongue.

He had not told them very much, he reflected, but perhaps he
should have told them nothing at all. He looked down at his hands, saw the ring the potter had given him, and remembered the potter’s warning. It was quite possible that some of these very
drari
sitting here with him had stabbed or shot an
assas
or a
mokhazni;
there was no way of knowing.

They were still looking at him expectantly.

“El hassil
,” he said again. It was no use; he could not pretend innocence. “I think you want to know if my heart is with your hearts.”

Benani frowned, but Amar could see that he approved of his reply.

“We’re interested in your head, too,” he said. “It’s no good having a heart if you haven’t got a head. You haven’t got much of a head. That didn’t matter until today. But now—” he looked at Amar fixedly—”you’ve got to have a head, you understand?”

He did understand perfectly. Benani was saying that since he had stumbled onto Moulay Ali he was necessarily involved; there was no way of pretending otherwise.

“I have a head, but no tongue,” he said.

Benani laughed shortly. “I know, I know. They all say that. But after the first five minutes in the
commissariat
they have a tongue that would reach from Bab Mahrouk to Bab Fteuh. Until you get to the
commissariat
you need a head. It’s only when you get there that you find out what sort of heart you have, and know what’s more important to you, your own skin or your Sultan’s faith in you.”

Benani was watching him closely, probably to trace the effect of his words on Amar’s countenance. This seemed scarcely the moment to recall Mohammed Lalami’s words: “The Sultan will never come back, and the party doesn’t want him back,” but he could not help hearing them again in his mind’s ear, as well as what Mohammed had said immediately afterward: “It’s not the party’s fault, is it, if the people of Morocco are all donkeys?” Benani was taking him for one of the donkeys, was telling him, in fact, that he had got to be one. The lie had to be at the center of any understanding he could have with these people. He nodded
his head slowly, as if he were pondering the profound wisdom of Benani’s statement.

“We’re your friends,” Benani said, leaning forward and wrapping the debris of the meal in the newspaper, “but you’ve got to prove that you know how to have friends.”

What bad luck, Amar thought. He did not want any of them as friends. “
B’cif
,” he said, “of course.” He looked at them. There was the pimply one who seemed to consider himself Benani’s henchman, a yellow-skinned, sickly one with thick glasses, a rather fat one who looked as though he had never walked farther than from the Kissaria to the Medersa Attarine, and a tall Negro whom he seemed to remember having seen at the municipal swimming pool in the Ville Nouvelle.

Benani sat up straight again, holding the folded paper in his hand. “
Rhaddi noud el haraj men deba chouich
,” he said sententiously. “It’s going to be war this time, not just games.” Amar felt a thrill of excitement in spite of himself. “Do you know what’s happened?” Benani went on, his eyes suddenly blazing dangerously. “Tonight five thousand partisans are sleeping outside Bab Fteuh. Did you know that?”

Now Amar’s heart was beating very fast, and his eyes were wide open. “What?” he cried.

“It’s no secret,” said Benani grimly. He called to the
qaouaji,
who got sleepily to his feet and staggered to where they sat. “We’re on our way,” Benani told him. The
qaouaji
shuffled back to the door, opened it, and peered out. Then he shut it again. The four others rose, shook hands solemnly with Amar and Benani, and went to the door; the
qaouaji
let them out. Benani remained seated where he was, silently staring at the mat on the floor, and Amar, not knowing whether the audience was over or not, also merely sat, until the other, who was taking the precaution of waiting until those who had left should be completely dispersed, finally rose to his feet.