The Spider's House (56 page)

He played until he was alone in distant places. Allah did not help him, but it did not matter. The loneliness that was in his heart, the longing for someone who could understand him if he spoke, these came out in the fragile strings of sound he made with his breath and his fingers. Thinking of nothing, he played on, and slowly the person for whom he played ceased being the figure by the door, became that other presence he had become aware of back in the tower early in the evening, someone whose existence in the world meant the possibility of hope. He stopped for an instant, and in his head, indissolubly a part of that happiness liberated by the idea of the other being, he heard a second music—like singing coming from a far-off sunlit shore, infinitely
lovely and inexpressibly tender, a filament of song so tenuous that it might be only the mind remembering a music it had never heard save in dreams. He lay still, hearing it, unable to draw the breath that would destroy it, perhaps forever. It was not from Allah, it was here, and yet he had not known that this world had anything so precious to offer. And when he finally had to breathe, and the other music ceased, as he had known it would, as naturally as if he had been thinking of him all the time, he saw in his mind the Nazarene man, a puzzling smile on his lips, the way he had looked in the hotel room the first evening.

At any moment Moulay Ali would say: “Go on,” or “Thank you,” and Amar wanted to think of the Nazarene. He had been a friend; perhaps with time they could even have understood one another’s hearts. And Amar had left him, sneaked away from Sidi Bou Chta without even saying good-bye. He opened his eyes and glanced toward the end of the room. The dark form was still there, unmoving. He sat up suddenly and looked at it. It was a jacket hanging on a nail in the shadows beyond the door.

CHAPTER 34

The
lirah
rolled down between two cushions where he had dropped it. Almost as soon as he was off the mattress, he was at the door, looking up and down the empty gallery. He knew exactly what had hapened, and he went over it all in his mind as he ran, checking each point. And he knew what would come next, unless he was unbelievably lucky. It was to look for that luck that he raced now to the stuffy little antechamber and up the moonlit stairs to the tower room, deserted save for the night
wind that came through the open windows. There was only one side of the tower that interested him, and that was the side with the view of the roof; fortunately one of the windows on that side was ajar, so he would not have to run the risk of making a noise in pushing it open. He looked down, judged the distance to the top of the gable, a difficult calculation to make in the moonlight; for it seemed further as he sat on the window sill gauging it than it proved to be an instant later when he landed on it. He had thrust his sandals into his pocket, and his bare feet made almost no sound as he hit.

There was no place to hide on the roof where he could not be picked out by a flashlight either from below or from the tower; that he ascertained very quickly. What he wanted to know, however, was whether the tower itself, which he had never seen from the outside, had a flat roof or a dome, and now he saw, and gave thanks, for it was flat. The problem for the moment was to lift himself back up to the window sill and from there to the very top, managing on the way to close the window so as to put them off the scent as much as possible. They were looking first of all, of course, for Moulay Ali, a plump, unathletic middle-aged man, and it would not be reasonable to expect him to have climbed out the window and swung himself up to the top of the tower. In fact, Amar thought, as he worked at the feat, he did not know any boys of his age who could do it, either. The last part had to be done with faith that the tiny concrete cornice to which his fingers clung up there above his head would not detach itself as he hung his entire weight upon it. On his way up he had shut the window without being really able to shut it, since the only handle was on the inside. But if a strong gust of wind did not suddenly blow in through the tower from the west, it would stay as it was.

When he got to the top, he crawled on his belly to the center, flopped over onto his back, and lay looking up at the round moon almost directly above him. If he remained lying flat like this they could not catch him in any conceivable beam of light thrown from below. He wondered how many police there were down there with Chemsi, how much money they had given him,
and whether Chemsi, as he stood hiding among the bushes with the French, and listening to the music of the flute, had been aware of any difference in the sound when Moulay Ali had ceased to play and Amar had begun. Very likely not, or there would have been a concerted attack on the house then and there; the police would have realized that this was the moment when Moulay Ali was getting away. He could very well imagine Chemsi standing out there, terrified, some petty grievance against Moulay Ali in his throat, so that all the friendship he had felt for him only a few days ago counted as nothing, whispering to the Frenchmen: “That’s Moulay Ali playing now! He always plays that piece when he’s drunk.” And the extra few minutes that Moulay Ali had thus induced the French to take in making their preparations, those precious minutes that had saved him (for still there had been no sound, and a silent capture was inconceivable) had been supplied by Amar as he lay there like a donkey, making music which he hoped Moulay Ali might admire. He smiled, twisting his head around, trying to see the rabbit in the moon, wondering why he felt no hatred for Moulay Ali for having tricked him—only admiration for the psychological accuracy with which the idea had been conceived and executed, and extemporaneously, too. There was true Fassi cleverness. And then, he felt a little sorry for Moulay Ali, because he would surely be caught sooner or later, and that was not a pleasant thing to look forward to. Even if the present trouble died down, the French would never rest until they had brought him to earth. The idea of being hunted day and night, of never having a really peaceful moment, struck him as particularly terrible. And Chemsi! He would not want to be Chemsi for everything in the world. “Don’t forget!” Moulay Ali had said as he went out, in case some were caught and some were not, in the flight they were about to make. Whoever was left free or could get a message to the outside would see to it that Chemsi was taken care of. For the Istiqlal was efficient above all at exterminating its own renegades. And they would find him eventually; he did not doubt that for a minute. The French would offer him only a token protection; they were at least sufficiently
human to have only contempt for informers, even if it was merely because informers were so plentiful (and besides that, it was much more expedient to let the old ones be got out of the way and take on new ones whose identity was not yet suspected). It was not likely that Chemsi would live to see the Feast of Mouloud.

The moon was so bright that the stars were invisible. The warm wind carried the faint odor of summer flowers that open at night. Apart from the crickets, were there any other sounds to be heard? He thought so: vague stirrings below, on the other side of the house. Soon he was certain; a slight rasping noise came up, and then, unmistakably, a voice. A moment later, many voices: they had got into the house. He smiled, amused by the mental image he had of the rage that would be on the Frenchmen’s faces when they discovered their quarry gone. They would run about like furious ants, along the galleries and into the rooms, up and down the stairs, shouting orders and curses, ripping open the mattresses and cushions, and smashing the tables—but carefully collecting all the papers. Not that it would do them any good, he thought; Moulay Ali was not the man to be careless with anything which could be compromising to members of the Party. If I’d been in the Party, he said to himself wistfully, he’d never have done this to me.

They were calling to each other in their harsh, hateful language, banging doors, stamping up and down. Now they had found Mahmoud and the other servants, and were bellowing at them in what they supposed was Arabic. “Which door did he go out?” roared one, and a second later, mimicking the inaudible reply: “ ‘I don’t know, monsieur!’ Maybe you’ll know in the commissariat.” He lay completely still, listening to each sound, wondering how far away Moulay Ali and the others had got by now. He hoped neither for their escape nor for their capture. It could not make much difference to Morocco one way or the other, nor could it be important how many other Moulay Alis there were and whether they failed or succeeded. By having lived with Christians they had been corrupted. They were no longer Moslems; how could it matter what they did, since they
did it not for Allah but for themselves? The government and the laws they might make would be nothing but a spiderweb, built to last one night. His father had told him that the world of
politique
was a world of lies, and he in his ignorance and stubbornness, pretending to agree, privately had gone straight ahead believing that the old man, like all old men, was out of touch with everyday truths. Thinking of his father made him want to cry; he clenched his fists and hardened all the muscles of his face.

The sounds of shouting and banging had come very near. He heard the men climbing the stairs to the tower; he could even catch their little exclamations of satisfaction. Suddenly convinced that now they were going to find him, he abandoned precautions, and rolled over onto his side to press his ear against the concrete floor of the roof. The word
“machine”
figured in their comments. It was the typewriter whose discovery pleased them so much. Now he stared at the side from which they would appear. A thick hand, white in the moonlight, would come feeling its way up over the edge, then grasp the ridge, and then another hand would come up, and then a head with eyes.

All at once they were breaking the windows. In rapid succession they pushed out the panes. The sheets of glass hitting the ground below made a brittle music. He wondered if Moulay Ali were still within hearing distance, and if so, what were his reactions when these sounds reached his ears. Would he think that Amar had been caught and that a struggle was in progress? Above all, would he think that Amar was going to tell them what innocuous facts he knew? But then he sighed: Moulay Ali surely had gone so far by now that he could hear nothing. Such tiny tinkling crashes would die on the night breeze even before it had carried them as far as the olive grove.

It was only now that he discovered and verified an astonishing fact: with the police only three or four meters below him, he became aware that it was largely a matter of indifference to him whether they found him or not. He even had a crazy momentary impulse to bang on the roof and shout: “Here I am, you sons of dogs!” They would try to climb up to get him, and he would simply lie still and watch. And when they did have him finally,
they would beat him and carry him off to the torture room in the police station where they would attach electrodes to his
qalaoui,
and the pain would be more terrible than anything he had ever known or imagined, but he would keep his lips closed tight. It would serve no purpose at all, beyond that of giving him at last the wonderful satisfaction of feeling a part of the struggle. Perhaps if he had had a secret to withhold, the temptation to announce his presence would have become too strong to resist. But he knew nothing; it would have been only a silly game. And it occurred to him that no one cared whether there was an Amar or not, that if anyone but his family should care, it would not be because he was he, but because, as he moved blindly along the orbit of his life, he had accidentally become the repository of some scrap of information.

He listened: they were going back down the stairs, back along the galleries, back through the house, and away. They had parked their jeeps somewhere far out in the fields, for he waited an interminable time before he heard the faint sound of doors being shut and motors starting up. When they were gone he turned over and sobbed a few times, whether with relief or loneliness he did not know. Lying up here on the cold concrete roof he felt supremely deserted, exquisitely conscious of his own weakness and insignificance. His gift meant nothing; he was not even sure that he had any gift, or ever had had one. The world was something different from what he had thought it. It had come nearer, but in coming nearer it had grown smaller. As if an enormous piece of the great puzzle had fallen unexpectedly into place, blocking the view of distant, beautiful countrysides which had been there until now, dimly he was aware that when everything had been understood, there would be only the solved puzzle before him, a black wall of certainty. He would know, but nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.

After a long time he crawled over to the edge and climbed down into the tower, slipping his feet into his sandals to protect them from the slivers of shattered glass that reflected the moon’s light. His silent passage through the dark house was not even
frightening: it was only infinitely sad, for now the house belonged completely to what had been and never would be again. He went straight to the broken front door and stepped outside. There were no sounds at all. The night had reached its furthest point: no crickets strummed in the grass, no night birds stirred in the bushes. In another few minutes, although it still was far away, the dawn would arrive. Even before he reached the olive trees, he heard the melancholy note of the first cockcrow behind him.

CHAPTER 35

And here he was in the Ville Nouvelle, and it was the middle of the morning. The sun hammered down upon the pavements that covered the earth of the plain, and the pitiful little trees that were meant to give shade slowly withered in its heat. He kept to the quiet back streets where few people passed. It was a painfully hot day. An old Frenchwoman was approaching, dressed all in black, carrying her shopping bag full of food home from the market. She looked at him with suspicion, and crossed the street slowly before he got to her, so as not to have to meet him face to face. Not a single child played outside the houses, no traffic passed, and no radios played; possibly the electricity was still cut off. The city seemed nearly deserted, but he knew that behind the curtains of the windows were a thousand pairs of eyes peering out into the empty streets, following the passage of whoever ventured along them. Every sign was bad: when the French were frightened there was no knowing what they might do.