The Spider's House (38 page)

“I see,” said Stenham. “It means old, applied to objects. If you want to lug him along it’s all right with me.”

The boy was still seated, looking up at them anxiously, from her face to his and back again.

“Suppose he hadn’t happened to meet us,” Stenham suggested. “What would he have done then?”

“He’d probably have gone back into the town before the trouble started and gotten home somehow. Don’t forget it was you who spoke to him and asked him to sit down with us.”

“You’re sure you wouldn’t just like to give him some money and let it go at that?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” she said flatly.

“All right. Then I guess we’d better go.”

He handed the boy five hundred francs. “
Chouf
. Pay for the tea and
cabrhozels
, and ask the
qaouaji
to open the door for us.” Amar went out. It was perfectly possible, thought Stenham, that the proprietor of the café would refuse to run the risk of opening the door; they had no one’s word but the boy’s to the contrary. He stepped to the back door and looked out once again at the pool. The sun had gone behind the walls; in the afternoon shade the patio had taken on an austere charm. The surface of the water was smooth, but the plants along the edges, trembling regularly, betrayed the current beneath. A swallow came careening down from the ramparts toward the pool, obviously with the intention of touching the water. Seeing Stenham, it changed its direction violently, and went off in blind haste toward the sky. He listened: the shooting was not audible at the moment, there were no street-vendors’ shouts, no water-sellers’ bells jangling, and the high murmur of human voices that
formed the city’s usual backdrop of sound was missing. What he heard was the sharp confusion of bird-cries. It was the hour of the swallows. Each evening at this time they set to wheeling and darting by the tens of thousands, in swift, wide circles above the walls and gardens and alleys and bridges, their shrill screams presaging the advent of twilight.

So, he thought, it’s happened. They’ve done it. Whatever came to pass now, the city would never be the same again. That much he knew. He heard Lee’s voice behind him.

“Amar says they’ve unlocked the door for us. Shall we go?”

BOOK 4
THE ASCENDING STAIRWAYS

A questioner questioned concerning the doom about to fall upon the disbelievers, which none can repel, from Allah, Lord of the Ascending Stairways.

—THE KORAN

CHAPTER 24

The man and the woman stood there for a moment while the
qaouaji
closed and bolted the door behind them. A pall of dust lay over the square, raised by the boots of the soldiers as they hurried back and forth from the trucks to the barricade they were building at the foot of the gate. In his head Amar was thinking: “Allah is all-powerful.” Once more He had intervened in his favor. Now that he reviewed the events of the past two or three hours, it seemed to him that at the first moment when the man had come into the café he remembered having noticed a strange light around his head. A second later he had seen that it was only the glint in his blond hair. But now that their two fates were indissolubly linked, he recalled the brightness that
had moved in the air where the man’s head was, and preferred to interpret it as a sign given him by Allah to indicate the course he must follow. It was his own secret power, he told himself, which had made it possible for him to recognize the sign and behave accordingly. From the moment he had seen the man’s grave face looking out the window at him as he sat by the pool he had known that he could, if he wanted, count on his protection. It was even possible that in addition he might be able to add enough to his savings to buy a pair of shoes. But that was a secondary consideration of which he was ashamed as soon as it occurred to him. “I don’t want the shoes,” he told Allah, while they were crossing the square. “All I want is to stay with the Nesrani and obey his commands until I can go home again.”

The fact that it was the woman who had made the actual suggestion of taking him to the hotel counted for nothing: the pattern of life was such that women were on earth only to carry out the bidding of men, and however it might look as though a woman were imposing her desires, it was always the will of men that was done, since Allah worked only through men. And how rightly, he thought, gazing with distaste at this woman’s scanty clothing and her shameless way of walking along jauntily beside the man, as though she thought it perfectly proper for her to be out in the street dressed in such a fashion.

They had come to a row of policemen who stood in the way of the exit from the square. The man was talking to them. One of them designated Amar. He supposed the man was explaining that this was his servant, for presently whatever difficulties had existed appeared to have been smoothed out, and the Frenchmen seemed satisfied. Two of the uniformed men began to walk with them, so that they were now a party of five, going up the long avenue between the walls toward the sunset.

There were soldiers everywhere; they walked in the public gardens under the orange trees, leaned against the wall along the river, strutted among the overturned deck-chairs of the cafés m the park, and stood glowering at attention on either side of the high portal that led into the old Sultan’s palace. A few were French, but most of them were grim-faced Berbers with shaved
heads and narrow slanting eyes. They had helped the French in Indochina, and now they were helping them once more in their own land, and against their own countrymen. Amar felt his heart swell with hatred as he walked past them, but then he tried to think of something else, for fear the Frenchmen going along beside him would feel the force of his hatred. The man and the woman were talking together in a lively fashion as they turned into the long street of Fez-Djedid, and occasionally they even laughed, as though it had not occurred to them that death was everywhere around them, behind the walls of the houses and in the twilit alleys to their left, to their right. Perhaps they did not even know what was happening: they belonged to another world, and the French had respect for them.

About halfway to Bab Semmarine the street took on a somewhat more usual aspect. Here the large Algerian cafés were full, the flames of the lamps flickered on the tea-drinkers’ faces, certain clothing shops were open, throngs of men and boys walked back and forth talking excitedly, being prevented from stopping by the police who constantly prodded them, saying gruffly: “
Aliez!
Z
id!
Z
id! Vas-y
!” It was along here that Amar suddenly became aware of someone walking behind him, softly saying his name: “A
mar! Yah, Amar!
“ The voice was deep, mellow, resonant; it was Benani. But remembering Benani’s warning of the night before, that he must not step outside the walls of the Medina, he decided to pretend to hear nothing, and walked along as close to the Christian man as he was able. Still the voice continued to call his name discreetly, perhaps two meters behind him, through the hubbub and chaos of the crowd, never increasing in volume or changing its inflection.

“So that’s what they’re like,” he thought cynically. Amar was supposed to stay inside the Medina and wait for the French
to
shoot him or carry him off to jail, while the members of the Party, once they had made the trouble, took care to remain outside, so that they might enjoy complete freedom.

In a café on their right several Algerians were singing, grouped around a young man playing an
oud.
The two tourists wanted to stand still a moment and listen, but the police would
not let them, and instead hurried them along toward Bab Semmarine. It was only when they had gone beneath the first arch, and were holding their breaths against the onslaught of the urinal’s stench inside, that the insistent voice became more pressing. “Amar!” it said. “Don’t turn around. It’s all right; I know you hear me.” (Amar glanced slyly first at the policeman on his left, then at the other. Apparently neither one of them understood Arabic, and even if they had, it was unlikely that they would have been able to notice and single out that one voice in the tumult around them.) “Amar! Remember you have no tongue. We—” The echoing sound of a carriage passing through the vaulted tunnel covered the rest of the message. When they had come beneath the further arch out into the open once more, the voice was gone. The bad dream had been dispersed by the admonition to keep silence; Benani imagined that he and the two foreigners were under arrest.

The Rue Bou Khessissate was virtually deserted, the shop-fronts had been battened down, and the windows of the apartments in the upper stories, where the more fortunate Jewish families lived, were hidden behind their shutters. Here and there, as they went briskly down the long, curving street, Amar saw, in back of a blind partly ajar, a stout matron in her fringed headdress, holding a lamp and peering anxiously out, doubtless asking herself vaguely if the thing which every Jew feared in times of stress might come to pass—if the infuriated Moslems, frustrated by their powerlessness to retaliate against the Christians, might not vent at least a part of their rage in a traditional attack upon the Mellah. For there was certainly nothing to stop them, if the desire came to them: a token detachment of police, most of them Jewish themselves, and one little radio patrol car, stationed just inside Bab Chorfa, which the mob could have turned over with one hand if it had felt like it. He wondered whether the young Arabs would be coming tonight to kill the men and violate the girls (for although it was not a very great triumph to have a Jewish girl, still it was a fact that a good many of them were actually virgins, and this was an undeniable attraction in itself); his intuition told him that this time would
not be like the other times, that the Istiqlal would issue special directives forbidding such useless excesses. For the moment he felt magnificently superior: he was walking with four Nazarenes, and he could count on their protection. Then he thought of the old adage: “You can share the meal of a Jew, but not his bed. You can share the bed of a Christian, but not his meal,” and he wondered if he would have to share the man’s bed. It was well known that many Christians liked young Arab boys. If the Christian attacked him, he would fight; of that he was certain. But he did not really believe in the likelihood of such a thing.

When they came to the Place du Commerce, he saw that the fair which had filled the square the night before was now almost entirely dismantled. Even in the dark, with the aid of flashlights and carbide flares, workmen were hastily folding the flimsy partitions, crating the mechanical apparatuses, and piling everything into the trucks that had been standing behind the booths. There were several taxis at the far end of the square. The policemen led them to the first car, and when Amar and the two tourists were inside, one of them got in front beside the driver. The other stepped back, saluted, and told the man at the wheel to go to the Mérinides Palace. Amar was elated. He had never before been in a taxi, nor, indeed, in any ordinary automobile—only in buses and trucks, and there was no denying that these small vehicles went much faster. The little suburban villas sped past, then the stadium and the railway crossing, and then there were, on one side, the long unbroken ramparts enclosing the Sultan’s orchards, and the open desolate plain on the other.

So far, the man had studiously avoided speaking at all to Amar, and Amar guessed that he did not want the police to know he understood Arabic. Occasionally the woman flung an encouraging smile at him, as if she thought he might be afraid to be with strangers. Each time she did this he smiled back politely. They were talking about him now, he knew, but it was in their own language, and that was all right.

Outside Bab Segma there was great activity. In the dust raised by moving vehicles the beams of several powerful searchlights
crossed each other, making a design that was complicated by the headlights of trucks and camionettes. As the taxi approached the gate, Amar saw a row of small tanks lined up against the wall. A sudden, enormous doubt surged within him. It was perfectly useless, this absurd flight he was making from his own people into a foreign precinct, with foreigners. Even if the police did not pull him out of the car here at Bab Segma, or further along the road, or at Bab Jamaï, they would surely take him from the hotel. And even if the kind lady and gentleman managed to protect him for a certain length of time, sooner or later there would come an hour when he would be alone momentarily, and that was all the French needed. Certainly in their eyes he would be more suspect for having been with these two outsiders.

The taxi swerved to the left, climbed the hill that led past the entrance to the Casbah Cherarda where the Senegalese troops were quartered. There were tanks there, too, and it was evident that tonight the guards were not the customary tall black men with their faces decorated by knife-scar designs, stiffly holding their bayonets at their sides; in their place stood red-faced Frenchmen with tommy-guns. At the top of the hill the car turned right, and went along the barren stretch where the cattle market was held on Thursdays. The policeman lolled beside the driver, one arm over the back of the seat, smoking a cigarette. Now that they were out in the country, and Amar’s fear had subsided somewhat, he was again able to view things rationally, and to be ashamed of his emotions of a minute ago. Allah had provided him with a means of escape from the café, without which he would no doubt have remained in there indefinitely, for no one else would have stirred outside, with all those soldiers in the square. And it was probable that he would eat tonight, and sleep quietly until morning. No man could righteously ask for more than that. When morning came, it would be a new day with new problems and possibilities, but of course it was sinful to think about a day that had not yet arrived. Man was meant to consider only the present; to be preoccupied with the future, either pleasantly or with anxiety,
implied a lack of humility in the face of Providence, and was unforgivable.