The Spider's House (54 page)

“You must forgive him,” Moulay Ali said, still standing in the doorway. “He’s been very busy today. Everyone in the house has been very busy.”

“Of course,” said Amar.

It was Moulay Ali’s suggestion that they go up to the office and watch for the arrival of the guests, who would be coming by a back lane from the Ras el Ma road. As they went through the dusty little antechamber toward the foot of the stairs he told Amar: “This will be just a small gathering of a few friends. Even in the middle of a war one must laugh.” It was the first time Amar had heard the trouble referred to as a war; the word excited him. Perhaps among those who were to arrive there would be men who that very day had killed Frenchmen with their own hands—heroes such as one sees only in the cinema or in magazines.

The shaded lamp on the table had been turned down so that it gave only a dull yellow glow. They sat on the hassocks and
talked, Moulay Ali running his eyes unceasingly over that particular region of the blackness outside in which he expected to see lights appear. “It’s very bad to be impatient,” he remarked at one point, “but tonight I’m more than that. In this work, at times like this, every day is like a year. You know the situation in the morning; by evening it’s all different, and you have to learn it all over again. But the one who wins is the one who studies it most.”

Amar looked at the well-nourished flesh of Moulay Ali’s face. He was talking because he was nervous, that much was evident. It was also clear that he thought of himself as a kind of general in this struggle he called a war, and the men who surrounded him accepted him as such. But a general does not live in a comfortable house attended by servants, nor spend his time sitting at a table typing and reading, Amar reflected; he has the finest horse and sword of all, and he rides at the head of his troops, spurring them on to greater daring and more complete disregard of life. That was what generals were for; they were to set the example. However, instead of giving voice to the things that were on his mind he merely sat quietly, until he heard Moulay Ali give a little grunt of satisfaction. “Aha, at last,” he said, sitting up straight and peering out into the night. Amar looked, saw nothing, continued to look, and eventually did see some small lights moving along irregularly, disappearing, re-emerging and gradually coming nearer. “It’s not an automobile,” he said in surprise. “Of course not,” said Moulay Ali. “They’re coming on donkeys. It’s a very narrow path.” He rose to his feet. “Excuse me a moment. They’ll be here in a little while. I want to be sure the big room is ready.”

In the dim room, sitting alone, Amar felt his doubt grow more intense. Moulay Ali might be a very good man, but he was not a Moslem. He never said either
“Incha’Allah”
or
“Bismil’lah”
and he drank alcohol and almost certainly did not pray, and Amar would not have been at all astonished to hear that on occasion he had eaten pork or neglected to observe Ramadan. How could such a man take it upon himself to lead Moslems in their fight against the injustices of the infidels?

As he was thinking about this, there came to him the unformulated memory of another personality; it was only a flavor, a suggestion, a shadow, like the premonition of a presence that had been with him and mysteriously still was with him, and a part of his mind compared it to the flavor of Moulay Ali, and found it better. All this taking place in the lightless depths of himself, he was aware only of a troubled feeling whose source he would not attempt to locate. But, as a whiff of smoke can whisper of danger to a man buried in the depths of sleep, this other presence, which he felt only as an unquiet place within him, was murmuring a message of warning—against what, he did not know.

CHAPTER 33

The dinner had been very good. They sprawled on the mattresses around the sides of the big room, talking and laughing. There were ten of them, including Lahcen, who had arrived late, having come by the main road on a bicycle. At the beginning of the meal, when one of the guests, a student from the Medersa Bou Anania, had tried to bring politics into the conversation, Moulay Ali had turned to him and announced loudly that he for one wanted to forget work and trouble for a while, and that he thought it would be a good idea to shelve the issues of the day while they ate. Everyone had approved vehemently; as a result the student had adopted a sour expression and refused to say a word to anyone during the remainder of the meal. Several bottles of wine had already been emptied, and more were on the way.

“That lamp,” said Moulay Ali suddenly to Amar, who sat
next to him. “Turn it down. It’s smoking.” Ever since the arrival of the guests he had been using Amar as a sort of orderly, a position which Amar was not at all loath to occupy, since it implied a certain intimacy between them. And then, he had noticed that it annoyed Lahcen, which gave him great pleasure, for he had no friendly feeling left for him, after all the gun-waving the big man had done in his face last night. Lahcen kept glowering in his direction, making it obvious that he disapproved of the whole game. Having heard Amar’s denunciation of his idol, he had decided once and for all that the boy was an enemy, and that it was very unwise of Moulay Ali to keep him in the house; in his uncomplicated mind there were no mitigating circumstances for behavior such as Amar’s.

Occasionally, as if they all had decided beforehand at what instant it should be, there would come a silence, a gap in the sound of talking through which the hostile night around them was clearly perceptible, and they heard only the deceptively reassuring music of the crickets outside. Then swiftly, a little recklessly, someone would begin to talk, about anything at all—it did not seem to matter—and his words would be welcomed with an enthusiasm completely disproportionate to the interest they had evoked.

Mahmoud now brought a tray of bottles, most of which contained beer. But there was also the same decanter of green chartreuse from which Amar had been served the other day. Moulay Ali tried to give him a bottle of beer. When he refused it, he offered to pour him a little of the liqueur. Amar wanted to say: “I’m a Moslem,” but all he said was: “I don’t drink.” “But you drank some of this the other afternoon,” said Moulay Ali, looking at him in astonishment. “That was a mistake,” Amar told him.

When everyone had been served, Moulay Ali leaned toward him and said in a low voice: “The news I promised to try and get for you is good.” Amar’s heart leapt. “Don’t talk about this,” he went on. “I don’t want all the others to hear. You have an older sister?” Without letting Amar reply, he continued. “Your mother and young sister went to Meknès three days ago
to stay with her and her husband. That’s all I know.” Raising his voice, he called across to a thin little man with glasses and a tiny moustache:
“Eh! Monsieur le docteur
!” (Amar stared at him in horror at the sound of the hated language.) “Come and sit here and tell me a few things.” To Amar he said: “You don’t mind moving down that way.” Amar walked to the other end of the room and sat on a fat cushion by himself, facing the whole assemblage. The two young men nearest him, seated at the end of the mattress, sipped beer and discussed the party newspaper.

Presently one of them shouted to Moulay Ali: “Felicitations, master! I hear your bubonic plague story made the placards in the students’ manifestation in Rabat yesterday. ‘Moroccans in the Concentration Camps Aren’t Dying Fast Enough to Suit the French. What’s the Remedy? Introduce Bubonic Plague into the Camps, and Make Room for More Prisoners.’ That was what they said. It made a number one scandal.”

Moulay Ali smiled. “I should hope it would,” he said.

Amar paid no attention to the talk, which seemed to grow louder as it progressed. He was occupied in giving repeated thanks to Allah for having saved Halima and his mother. As he began to listen once more to the words being said around him, he realized that this time Moulay Ali must have told his friends that it was safe to speak in front of him, for they were making no attempt to veil the meaning of anything they said. He could afford to feel delight over this, now that the worst tension was eased. Three days ago, Moulay Ali had said. That was the day he had gone to the Café Berkane and met the two Nazarenes, the very day he had walked out of his house to take a stroll, and his mother had said: “I’m afraid.” They would have had to leave the house very shortly after he had, to have got out of the Medina before the shooting had closed it entirely. What could have decided his father to get them out so suddenly? Perhaps Allah had simply sent him a message.

“No chance of negotiation,” said the doctor. “They can send a new Résident from Paris every morning if they like. It won’t get them anywhere. It would still have been possible last week.

Even yesterday, perhaps. Now, never.” He seemed to be speaking to the room at large; everyone was listening. “It was a master stroke to get them all in there at once.”

“But will the people really take it as hard as we imagine?” This was said rapidly in a high voice by a young man in a blue business suit. “Is the
horm
really so important to them? That’s very necessary to know.”

“Sksé huwa,”
said Moulay Ali shortly, pointing at Amar. “There’s your people. Ask him.”

Everyone but Lahcen turned and looked at Amar eagerly, with a strange expression almost of greed, he thought, as if he were a new kind of food which they were about to try for the first time. Moulay Ali merely smiled like a contented cat, while the doctor said to Amar: “Do you know what happened today in the Medina?”

“No,
sidi
,” Amar replied, new dread being born within him.

“The French swore they would put all the
ulema
of the Karouine in prison.”

“They couldn’t do that,” said Amar. “The
ulema
are holy.”

“Ah, but they could if they wanted! But the
ulema
went and took sanctuary in the
horm
of Moulay Idriss.”

In spite of himself Amar was relieved. “
Hamdoul’lah
,” he said with feeling. The others watched, fascinated.

The doctor then leaned forward a little as he said: “But the French broke into the
horm
and beat them and pulled every one of them out. By now they’re all in Rabat.”

Amar’s eyes had grown huge. “
Kifach
!” he cried. No one spoke. “But what’s going to happen? Haven’t we begun yet to burn the Ville Nouvelle?”

“Not yet,” said Moulay Ali. “We will.”

“But we mustn’t wait!”

“Remember that the only people who can move around at all are the ones who live in Fez-Djedid. Everyone else is locked into his house. Don’t forget that.” Now he turned back to the doctor. “Brahim’s suggestion would be sound if it weren’t unrealistic at the very beginning. A thing like that takes time.” They talked, but Amar retired once more into himself, with a
faint feeling of having been tricked. Not that he did not believe what the doctor had told him, but he resented the way in which they all had wanted to see how he took the tragic news; it was as if they themselves did not really care at all what had happened, as if they were outsiders in the whole affair.

“B’sif,”
a man with a black beard was saying. “The sooner you begin, the better. And you have to keep at it. Over and over. America sends France two hundred billion francs. America gives France a hundred billion more. France would like to leave Morocco, but America insists on her staying, because of the bases. Without America there would be no France. And so on.
Sahet, sahel.
All we need is one good attack on each American base. That shouldn’t be so hard to work up. Do you think so, Ahmed?” The man turned to the student who had sulked at dinner.

“I think it would be easy, at least among the students.” He was more out of sorts with Moulay Ali than with the others.

“Even with the faces of the French dogs in front of them everywhere, and the Americans hidden?” said Moulay Ali with delicate scorn. “
Soyez réaliste, monsieur.”

“We’re not all
djebala
, straight from the mountains,” the student retorted haughtily.

“And once we’ve had a few incidents directly involving American lives and property, maybe the Americans will know there’s such a country as Morocco in the world,” went on Brahim of the black beard. “Now they don’t know the difference between Morocco and the Sénégal. You can all sit there and say it’s unrealistic. But I’ll wager you that within a year it’ll be an official directive. The target will be shifted from the French to the Americans.” No one said anything; apparently they had been impressed into silence. The crickets sang: “Ree, ree, ree, ree.”

“Even if it’s only for propaganda purposes,” continued Brahim, encouraged by their stillness and by the wine he had drunk, “it would be useful. But it’s also true, which makes it much more powerful as propaganda.”

“The value of propaganda has no relationship to the degree of its truth,” intoned the man in the blue business suit, pouring
himself another glass of beer. “Only with its credibility to the section of the people at which it is aimed.”

Moulay Ali looked surreptitiously at the doctor and raised his eyebrows; the doctor winked. Brahim, not to be discouraged, paid no attention. “It’s the truth that America furnishes France with money, and that some of that money is spent for arms which are used against us. That may not make propaganda—I don’t know. But it’s the truth.”

Amar listened; this was something new. He had not known of the Americans’ secret villainy. But then, of course, there were a great many things that he was hearing for the first time. This word propaganda that they all kept using—he had never heard that before, but obviously it was a very important thing. The story of the evil Americans fascinated him; he longed to see one, to know what they looked like, what color their skin was, what language they spoke, but everyone else in the room knew the answers to those questions, and so he could not ask them. Now there seemed to be three separate conversations going on at once among the guests; some of them were shouting in their excitement. The room had grown smaller with their obstreperousness. A fat man had pushed the doctor out of the way and sat beside Moulay Ali, reading him a newspaper clipping. Moulay Ali leaned back, his eyes closed, now and then opening them to take a puff on his cigarette, and watching the smoke curl upward for a moment before he closed them again. Only he, of all of them, appeared able to maintain a wholly calm exterior. But even he, Amar thought with sadness, was not a Moslem and thus could not be relied upon to lead the people. A half-emptied glass of beer lay at his feet, and soon he would bend forward to pick it up.