The Spider's House (29 page)

And then it occurred to him that if his suspicion about her were correct, then almost certainly she knew all about him. Kenzie had said: “She’s heard of you.” That could have been either merely the innocent reference to his books that it was meant to sound, or it could have been something else. Certainly the Party never forgot the names of those who had been of it. But nothing provided a satisfactory explanation of the manner of her departure.

That week the political situation in the region worsened considerably. A wave of arson spread over the land; everywhere the fields of wheat, gold, dry, ready to be harvested, caught fire, went up in flame and heavy blue smoke. The fire-fighters, French volunteers from neighboring farms, and from Fez and Meknès, were often shot at, sometimes hit. The express train on its way to Algier through the valleys of the waste land to the east of Fez was derailed and wrecked, then strafed. A bomb exploded in the post office of the Medina, just five minutes’ walk from the hotel. Because a dozen Jews had been burned alive in a political manifestation at Petitjean, a monstrous little town some sixty miles back of Fez, there were riots in Fez between Jews and Moslems, and the police threw a protective cordon around the Mellah.

“If we catch a Jew alone in the street at night now, we treat him like a Moslem woman,” Abdelmjid had said one morning when he came to get the breakfast tray.

“What do you mean?” Stenham had asked him; he expected a
shocking revelation, a new, lurid sidelight on the socio-sexual deportment of the Moroccans.

“Why, we throw stones at him until he falls down. Then we throw more stones and kick him.”

“But surely you don’t do that to Moslem women,” Stenham protested; he had seen examples of unparalleled brutality to women, but there had always been some motive.

“Of course we do!” Abdelmjid had replied, surprised that the Christian should not be acquainted with such a basic tenet of public behavior. “Always,” he added firmly.

“But suppose you were sick,” Stenham began, “and your wife, Rhaissa, had to go out and get medicine or help for you?”

“At night, alone? Never!”

“But if she did?” he insisted.

Abdelmjid, used to the Europeans’ futile fondness for playing with possibilities, humored him in the elaboration of his improbable fantasy. “Then she would run the risk of being killed, and it would serve her right.”

Stenham had no more to say. Sometimes the senselessness of their violence paralyzed him. They were like maniacal robots; perhaps once there had been some reason for their behavior, but the reason was long since gone, no one remembered what it had been, and no one cared.

For the past few days not a single guest had arrived at the hotel. Outside the entrance gate there were always four or five French policemen standing; Stenham imagined they looked accusingly at him as he passed. At the outer gate, hidden in among the buses, they parked their command-car, but only during the day; at night the place was empty. An army could have assembled there undetected. Kenzie had twice been called to the Prefecture and been solemnly advised to drive his MG out of the city and back to wherever he had come from. “Is that an order?” he had inquired. “If so, the British Consul will be most interested to hear about it.”

“What cheek!” he had snorted when he returned to tell Moss of his experience. “My visa’s in order. Just trying to scare me out, the bloody bastards.”

Moss, however, was inclined to take a more serious view of it. “I think you should go about on foot and in public conveyances, like the rest of us,” he counseled him. “You’re so conspicuous there in your solitary splendor, riding through the mob in Fez-Djedid. I noticed it the other day when I was sitting in one of the Algerian cafés there and you passed, and I thought: What a patient race they are, really. I wonder they haven’t attacked you.”

“Attacked me!” Kenzie cried indignantly. “Why should they?”

“Yes, attacked you,” Moss repeated imperturbably. “Any situation like this is largely a matter of the have-nots versus the haves, you know. You’re only tempting Providence, I assure you.”

“But the car has English plates,” objected Kenzie.

Moss was shaken by laughter. “I daresay those people are aware of that! The few who’ve ever heard the word probably would tell you England was a town somewhere in Paris. Why don’t you have an enormous Union Jack made and spread it over the hood? Then they might think you were advertising a circus.”

“They haven’t bothered me yet. It’s the French I have to look out for.”

From day to day they were following the situation by reading the papers from Casablanca and Rabat, and this gave the events a character that was official and at the same time vaguely legendary, removing them a little from reality. Sometimes they felt that they were living in the middle of an important moment of history, although they had to remind themselves and each other of it from time to time. Also, the news sources, all French, gave a firm impression that the authorities were completely in command of things, that nothing serious had happened or was going to happen. Even if one made allowances for the natural tendency of the government-controlled press to play down the gravity of the events, one still felt confidence in the ability of the French to keep the situation from getting out of hand. The closing off of the Mellah seemed somehow an unreal event, an absurd and arbitrary precaution. One could determine how people felt only
by observing their faces, and to Stenham those faces looked the same as always. So that he was forced to suppress a smile when Rhaissa came bursting into his room one morning with the news that a certain
mejdoub
had been murdered in the Zekak al Hajar by the French only an hour ago, and that before the day was out very bad things would happen. She was in a state of excitement bordering on hysteria; this made it difficult for him to get any sort of clear picture of what had happened.

He knew that the only difference between a
mejdoub
and an ordinary maniac was that the
mejdoub
was a Cherif. It was impossible for a Cherif to be crazy; by virtue of his holy blood his madness was automatically transformed into the gift of prophecy. For this reason, no matter how outrageous a person’s behavior in public might be, it was dangerous to attribute it to a mere derangement of the mind. Unless one knew the person and his family, one might commit the sinful mistake of imagining he was a madman when in reality he was a man directly in touch with the truth of God. Many times Stenham had observed this attitude on the part of the common people. If a man were rolling in the dust of some foul alley, half latrine, or addressing the sun in the middle of the crowd, or screaming unintelligible insults to a café-ful of card-players, the others carefully ignored him. If he offered them violence, they met it with determined gentleness, and even though Stenham was aware that their reaction was motivated by fear rather than kindness, he often had admired the restraint and patience they showed in dealing with these obstreperous creatures.

“The French shot a
mejdoub
?” he repeated incredulously. “They couldn’t have. There’s a mistake somewhere.”

No, no, she insisted, there was no mistake. Everyone had seen it. He had been calling maledictions upon the French, crying: “Ed
dem! Ed dem!
The Moslems must have blood!” the way he always did, and two policemen on their way down to the Nejjarine had stopped and watched him for a moment. And when he had seen them, he had identified them as emissaries of Satan, and shrieked louder for Allah to exterminate their race, and suddenly the two Frenchmen had spoken a few words with
each other, gone over to him and pushed him against the wall. Then he had rushed at them and struck them and scratched them, and they had reached for their pistols and shot him down, each with one bullet. And the
mejdoub
(the blessing of Allah be upon his head) had fallen down, still howling:
“Ed dem!”
and died right in front of all the people, and more police had come and taken the body away, and hit the people in the street to make them keep walking along. And it was a terrible, terrible sin, one which Allah would not find it in His heart to forgive, and one which the Moslems would be obliged, whether they wished it or not, to avenge. Today was an accursed day,
bismil’lah rahman er rahim.
“And my husband and I, who work for the Nazarenes here in the hotel, who knows what will happen to us? The Moslems are very bad. They may kill us,” she finished tearfully. There was always that element of ambivalence in the mind of a Moslem when he talked to a Christian about his own people. For a while it was “we,” then suddenly it shifted to “they,” and as likely as not out came some sort of bitter criticism or condemnation.

“No, no, no,” said Stenham. “They might kill
me,
because I’m a Nazarene, but why should they kill you? You’re a good Moslem. You’re just earning your living.”

Rhaissa was not consoled. She could think of too many good Moslems who had been earning their living working for the Nazarenes, and who had been shot down or stabbed without a chance to defend themselves; the fact that they had been working for the police was not relevant in her mind. “
Aymah
!” she wailed. “This is a very bad day!”

When he had finally got rid of her he went to the window and listened. The day was like any other day, the same sleepy sounds rose up from the Medina: the distant droning of the sawmill, donkeys braying, here and there a snatch of Egyptian song from a radio, and the cries of children. In the garden sparrows chirped. He sat down to work, found it impossible, and silently cursed Rhaissa. Then he tried lying in the sun for a while, with the hope that it might relax him, or start the flow of thought, or whatever it was he needed. But for the past week or ten days the
weather had been too hot for sunbathing, and surely it was too hot today. The sweat ran down all the creases of his flesh, wet the cushions of the chairs. So he began to type letters at the table in the center of the room, lifting his gaze at frequent intervals to let it run unthinkingly across the panorama of hills and walls. After an hour or so, he slowly became conscious of the fact that he was spending most of his time looking out at the Medina. He incorporated the discovery in the letter, in one of those apologetic passages a person is wont to include when he feels that the missive he is engaged in writing, as a result of inattention or interruptions, is not going to be as well composed as it should be. “This is the damnedest place for trying to concentrate. It’s quiet, but that seems to count for nothing. Even while I’m writing this I find myself stopping every other minute to stare out the window. It isn’t to admire the view, because I don’t even see it. I know it by heart. You can imagine how much worse it is when I’m trying to work….”

He stopped again and reread what he had typed. It was absurd; he would have done better to try to find out
why
he kept staring out at the Medina. What did he think of that vast object out there, shining in the morning sun? He knew it was a medieval city, and he knew that he loved it, but that had nothing to do with what went on below the surface of his mind as he sat looking at it. What he really felt was that it was not there at all, because he knew that one day, sooner or later (and more likely sooner), it would not be there. And it was the same with all objects, all people. The city was, in a rough sense, a symbol; that was easy to see. It represented everything in the world that was subject to change or, more precisely, to extinction. Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved in existence. He was plagued by the suspicion that some day
he would discover he always had been wrong; until then he would have no choice but to continue as he was. A man cannot fashion his beliefs according to his fancy.

When he had finished four letters he shaved, dressed, and went out the back way into the courtyard. There was no one there; even the tall Riffian
huissier
who watched the cars was not in sight, perhaps because there were no cars at the moment to watch. On the other side of the gate in the street, life went on as usual. The proprietor of the antique shop that operated exclusively for guests of the hotel bowed low when he saw Stenham. For the first three or four years he had persisted with tenacity in the belief that this tourist could be persuaded to buy
something;
many times he had lured him into the shop and offered him tea, cigarettes and pipes of kif, all of which Stenham had accepted with the warning that he was there solely as a friend, not as a customer. This had not hindered the man from going to the trouble of unfolding Berber rugs to spread across the floor, calling his sons and bidding them act as models to show off the ancient brocaded kaftans in front of the Nazarene gentleman, or opening the studded chests covered with purple and magenta velvet to bring out daggers and swords and powder horns and snuff boxes and chapelets and fibulae and a hundred other obsolete items in which Stenham had absolutely no interest.

Now, after all this time, the man had finished by being a little in awe of this inexplicable foreigner who had withstood so many onslaughts without once succumbing; the two were on the politest of terms. Nevertheless, Stenham did not like the man’s unctuousness, and he knew him to be an unofficial informer for the French. That was almost inevitable, of course, and was not the man’s fault. Any native who came in regular contact with tourists was obliged to tender reports to the police on their activities and conversation (although it was hard to understand what importance such superficial information could have for those who kept the records of the Deuxième Bureau). On several occasions the proprietor had attempted to engage Stenham in conversations that were, if carried through to their natural conclusion,
obviously going to come out into the realm of politics, but Stenham, in accepted Moroccan fashion, had gently led them in other directions and left them dangling in mid-air, impaled on the hooks of
Moulana
and
Mektoub
, from which no man could decently remove them.