The Spider's House (30 page)

“I hope the health is fine this beautiful day,” said the man, in French, as Stenham came near. Even his insistence on using the despised language annoyed Stenham; he liked Moroccans to speak to him in their own tongue. Then, without changing his facial expression or the debonair inflection of his voice, he added:
“Un mot, monsieur.”

“What?” said Stenham, startled.

“Don’t wander today.” The man smiled vacuously.
“Ah, oui,”
he went on, as if in answer to a remark by Stenham. “
Ah
,
oui, il fait très beau
. The sun is a little warm, of course, but that’s normal. It’s the summer now. Better to stay in the hotel. And Monsieur Alain? Is he well? Give him my salutations, please. I have some very fine Roman coins now, a perfect merchandise for a great
connoisseur comme Monsieur Alain.
Tell him, please. You see, the front of my shop is closed. I am about to go inside and lock the door.
Bon jour, monsieur! Au plaisir
!”

He bowed again and stepped into his shop. Stenham stood quite still for a moment, fascinated by this unexpected performance. The entire front of the store was indeed boarded up, with heavy iron bars running diagonally in both directions across the shutters. He had not noticed it until now. And the man did, even as he watched, close the door, lock it, and noisily slide its three bolts, one after the other.

He walked on to the outer gate and stood there in the midst of hurrying porters, peering up and down the winding road. For once there were no policemen visible, and so he continued along the open space between the city walls and the cemetery where the native buses stood, looking, out of curiosity, for the command-car. It was not there. He began to suspect that there might be some truth in Rhaissa’s tale, that the police had been ordered to potential trouble spots down in the city. But here the work of loading and unloading the buses and trucks was going
on as always, and there was no intimation that the day had anything unusual about it. Bored and hot, he strolled back to the hotel, met the receptionist on the main terrace.

“It’s hot today,” he said.

The tall man glanced up at the sky. “I think we may have thunder showers later this afternoon.” In his striped trousers and cutaway jacket he looked like a distinguished undertaker.

“Tell me,” said Stenham, “there are no other guests in the hotel now, besides the two English gentlemen and me, are there?”

The man looked startled, hesitated. “We are expecting others this evening. Why? If you wish to change your room, there is a choice, yes.”

Stenham laughed. “No. I’m delighted with my room, and also delighted to have the hotel empty. Not for your sake, of course,” he added. “But it’s more agreeable this way.”

The receptionist smiled thinly. “A question of taste,
bien entendu”

“All your European help sleep here in the hotel, don’t they?”

Now the man permitted himself to draw his head back slightly and stare into Stenham’s face. “I think I know what is in your mind, Monsieur Stenham. But allow me to reassure you. There is nothing to fear. Our native help is completely reliable.” (Stenham smiled to himself: the man had come out to Morocco for the first time four months ago and was already speaking like a
colon.)
“Most of them, as you know, go home at night. The few who are stationed here have long records of loyal service, and with the exception of the watchman, all are locked into their rooms by the major domo, who keeps the keys on his person.”

To Stenham this was both ludicrous and shocking. He said: “Really? I didn’t know.”

“Besides,” pursued the other, thinking he had made his point, “there is absolutely no cause for anxiety here in Fez.”

“Oh, I realize that,” said Stenham. “But this has been a bad season for you, even so.”

“The hotel is losing some fifty thousand francs a day, monsieur,” the man announced gravely. “The season will show an
enormous deficit, naturally. We keep the quantity of our food purchases down to the minimum, but I believe you will have noticed no lowering of the quality?”

“Oh, no, no,” Stenham assured him. “The food is always excellent.” This was not true, and they both knew it; at their best the meals were only adequate.

Suddenly Moss appeared on the stairs coming up from the lower garden. He was swinging a cane. The receptionist greeted him, excused himself, and disappeared.

They sat down at a table in the shade. The little Algerian came rushing over. Moss ordered a Saint Raphael. “I say, John, have you heard the latest? It’s too fantastic.”

“I’ve heard two or three fantastic things today so far. What’s yours?”

“It all has to do with a wild man the Istiqlal had been coaching to excite the mob—one of those poor demented things in rags who go about waving their arms, you know? The police fell directly into the trap.” He proceeded to tell what was substantially Rhaissa’s story, but with the added element of premeditated provocation on the part of the Nationalists. “It’s not very sporting of them, to sacrifice the poor old fool so cold-bloodedly, I must say. In any case, Hugh went dashing off in the car to investigate, and was promptly arrested. He telephoned a while ago, in a complete rage, because they won’t let him go until he produces his passport, which means that I’ve got to take it in to him. It’s rather curious how he manages always to botch things, isn’t it? All so unnecessary.”

“But why are you sitting here calmly having a drink, if he’s waiting?”

“Oh, I’ve ordered a cab,” Moss said wearily. “It’ll be here in a moment. But I really can’t take it too seriously, or feel too sorry for Hugh, you know, because he’s an idiot. His whole attitude is that of a boy at a cricket match. And of course it’s not a cricket match, is it? One doesn’t sit back and cheer when people are being killed. My feeling is that unless one can be of help in some way, one stays out of it entirely, don’t you think?”

Stenham agreed. Moss had finished his drink, wiped his mustache
with a handkerchief; now he stood up. “Well, my boy, I’ll see you anon. And do stay here in the hotel. They may arrest me too, who knows, and I’ll need you to get me out. Of course the blasted Consul has gone off somewhere for the day. I think it’s deliberate on his part. Be on the lookout for a telephone call.”

CHAPTER 20

When he got to his room, slightly out of breath, for the day was not only hot but unaccountably sultry and oppressive, his door was open and Rhaissa was scrubbing the floor. She had taken up the rugs and hung them over the balconies in the windows.
The
room smelled of the creosote solution in her pail. Pillows and bedclothes were piled on the chairs; his presence in the room at the moment was clearly redundant. However, he stepped inside and said to her: “Any more news?” She looked up, startled, and motioned for him to close the door behind him, which he did. Then, standing up and rolling her eyes in a way meant to imply conspiracy, she said: “There’s not going to be any feast.”

“Feast? What feast?” He had quite forgotten the advent of the Aid el Kebir.

“Why, the Feast of the Sheep, the great feast! We’ve had our sheep on the roof for three weeks. Now he is very fat. But they will kill anyone who makes the sacrifice.”

“Who will? What are you talking about?” He was in an unpleasant humor, he realized now, but he felt that it was partly her fault. Besides that, he wanted to sit down, and there was no place.

“The Moslems. The friends of freedom. They say anyone who sacrifices his sheep is a traitor to the Sultan.”

One more step toward death, he thought bitterly. Whether the rumor were true or not, the fact that they were saying such things, that such an inconceivable heresy should even occur to them, was indicative of the direction in which they were moving.

“B’sah?”
He said harshly. “Really? And I suppose everyone is going to listen to them and obey them? Politics is more important than religion? Allal al Fassi is greater than Allah? Why don’t they call him Allah el Fassi and have done with it?” The pun seemed rather good to him.

She could not follow his reasoning; she understood only enough of what he had said to be profoundly shocked. “No one is greater than Allah,” she replied gravely, considering what punishment was going to be meted out by God to this ignorant Nazarene for his outrageous utterances.

“Are you going to sacrifice your sheep or not?” he demanded.

She shook her head slowly from side to side, keeping her eyes on his.
“Mamelouah,”
she said. “It’s forbidden.”

He was exasperated with her. “It’s not forbidden!” he shouted. “On the contrary, it’s forbidden not to! Allah demands it. Has there ever been a year when there was no sacrifice?”

She continued to shake her head. “Last year,” she said, “there was no feast.”

“Of course there was! Didn’t Abdelmjid kill a sheep last year?”

“His father killed it. We were not married until afterward, just before Mouloud.”

“But he did kill it.”

“Oh, yes. But it was wasted, because the Sultan was taken away that very day.”

“Ah,” said Stenham thoughtfully. “I see. Of course,” The French had chosen the holiest day of the year to whisk the Sultan away, and it had been the false Sultan who had performed the sacrifice. Therefore there had been no sacrifice. He was silent a moment. Presently he asked her: “Why can’t you sacrifice your sheep in the name of the true Sultan?”

“The Istiqlal doesn’t want any feast,” she said patiently. “It’s a sin to make a feast when everyone is unhappy.”

“You mean the people might forget they were unhappy if they had their feast, and that’s what the Istiqlal doesn’t want. It wants them to remember they’re unhappy. Isn’t that it?”

“Yes,” she said, a little uncertainly.

“But can’t you see?” he cried, shouting in spite of himself, aware that she couldn’t see at all, never would see. “Can’t you see that they’re trying to take your religion away from you so they can have all the power? They want to close the mosques forever and make slaves out of all the Moslems. Slaves!”

“My mother was a slave in the Pacha’s house,” said Rhaissa in a matter-of-fact tone. “She used to have chicken every day, and she had four bracelets of heavy gold and a silk kaftan.”

As people have a way of doing when they know they are lost. Stenham resorted to sarcasm. “And I suppose she loved being a slave,” he said.

“It was written.” Rhaissa shrugged.

“Yes. Of course,” he said, wondering how he had happened once again to allow himself to fall into the error of engaging in an argument with one of these people, since it was manifestly impossible to keep control of any discussion, and since the discussion’s inevitable failure to remain on the road of logic always gave him a depressing sense of his own futility. After all, if they were rational beings, he thought, the country would have no interest; its charm was a direct result of the people’s lack of mental development. However, one could scarcely hope for them to be consciously and militantly backward. Once they had got hold of even the smallest fragment of the trappings of European culture they clung to it with an absurd desperation, but they were able to make it their own solely to the extent that the fragment was isolated from its context, and therefore meaningless. But after so many centuries in the deep-freeze of isolation, it was to be expected that, having been brought out of it, the culture should now undergo a very rapid decomposition. “It was written,” she had told him, and he had agreed with her; that was the final and all-embracing truth about Morocco—about the world, for that matter. Discussion was nothing more than the clash of personalities.

“Mektoub.”
She was standing there, still looking at him inquiringly. He did not know what she was expecting him to add, and since he had nothing to say, he smiled at her, opened the door and went back downstairs. She would never finish the room if he stayed there.

For a while he sat in a dark corner of the lobby looking at old numbers of magazines dealing with the commercial aspects of the French colonies; they were illustrated with what were to him inconceivably dull photographs of factories, warehouses, bridges and dams under construction, housing projects and native workers. It all reminded him of the old Soviet publications he had used to study. After all, he reflected, Communism was merely a more virulent form of the same disease that was everywhere in the world. The world was indivisible and homogeneous; what happened in one place happened in another, political protestations to the contrary. Or perhaps the great difference was that the West was humane; it allowed its patients to be anesthetized, whereas the East took suffering for granted, plunged ahead toward the grisly future with supreme indifference to pain.

“The trouble with you, John,” Moss had declared, “is that you have no faith in the human race.” He had admitted it, but his argument had been that for him it was necessary first to have faith in God. “And have you the faith?” Moss had asked him. He said he had not. Moss was triumphant. “And you never will have!” he had cried. “The two are inseparable.” Stenham had qualified this as specious reasoning, typical of the lack of humility of modern man. “Don’t give me that,” he had said. “I don’t want it. It’s exactly where all the trouble has come from.” It was little scenes such as this one which he dreaded most when he was with Moss, and Moss was always provoking them; they would be in the midst of one before he realized it. Moss was so sure of himself, so comfortably anchored and so untroubled by the surges of existence; his facile homilies were meaningless.

He slapped the magazines down on the table and went to eat lunch. The silence of the dining-room was disturbing. The waiters came and went on tiptoe, and their conversation with
each other was carried on in whispers. For the first time he heard orders being given in the kitchen. And then from the open window came the long, slowly rising note of a muezzin calling the prayer of the
loulli.
Immediately it was joined by another, until it became a great ascending chorus of clear tenor voices. Just as there was always the first lone voice, there was also the last, after the others had finished. He listened to the way it drew out the final syllable of its
Allah akbar!
Having called to the east and south and west, the man was now facing the north, and the voice came floating over the city clear as the sound of an oboe. Then a rooster’s crowing on some nearby roof covered it, and the waiter arrived with a large
vol au vent
and set it before him. All at once he was conscious of the absurdity of the moment. This entire mechanism, the kitchen with its chef, the busboys in the pantry, the hierarchy of waiters, the assortments of china, glassware and cutlery, the wagon with its rotating display of hors d’oeuvres, the trays on wheels with their aluminum ovens and flickering blue alcohol flames, all of it was for him, was functioning for him alone. It was not as though there were a possibility that someone else might come in and lift the weight of responsibility from his shoulders. No one would come, and when he finished, the whole array would be cleared away and the tables set for dinner that night, and then even he might not be there, if he decided to go and eat in the city. Suddenly, aloud, he said: “Oh, my God!” He had just remembered that he was expected at Si Jaffar’s for dinner.