The Spider's House (6 page)

He listened to his father’s words with growing impatience. There were repeated references to his duties as a descendant of the Prophet. To whom could the people turn in times of difficulty, if not to the Chorfa? Every Cherif was a leader. It was true, but he knew there was something wrong with the picture. The Chorfa were the leaders, but they could lead their followers only to defeat, and this was something he could never say to anyone. As if the old man had sensed the emotion, if not the precise idea that was in his son’s mind, he stopped talking for a moment, and then began to speak again in a much lower voice, sadly. “I have committed a very great sin,” he said. “Allah will be the judge. I should have beaten you day and night, dragged you to school by your hair, until you knew how to write. Now
you will never learn. It’s too late. You will never know anything. And this is my fault.”

Amar was shocked; his father had never spoken in such a manner. “No,” he said tentatively. “My fault.”

In the dimness Amar saw his father’s arms reach out toward him. A hand was placed on each temple, and the old man bent forward and touched his lips lightly to the boy’s forehead. Then he sat back, shook his head back and forth several times in silence, rose, and went out of the room without saying any more.

A few minutes later Mustapha appeared frowning in the doorway, obviously having been sent by his father to inquire after Amar’s health. The first instant, upon seeing him, Amar had been about to say something bitter; then a strange calm took possession of him, and he found himself saying in the most benign accents: “Ah,
khai, chkhbarek?
It’s several days since I’ve seen you. How is everything?”

Mustapha seemed bewildered; inexpressively he murmured a perfunctory phrase of greeting, turned and went downstairs. Amar lay back smiling; for the first time he felt that he had the upper hand in a situation where he had never dared hope to have it. Mustapha was his older brother; he had been born first, and twenty-six sheep had been sacrificed that day, two of them paid for by his father, whereas when Amar had come into the world Si Driss had bought only one. It was true that there had been another sheep, donated by a friend, but for Amar that one did not count. It was also a fact that Mustapha had been born up in the hills in Kherib Jerad, and the other twenty-four sheep had been brought as gifts by peasants overjoyed to see a Cherif born among them, while Amar had been born in the heart of the city, and only the family had rejoiced, but that did not ever occur to him when he began sifting over his wrongs. The important thing now was that Mustapha was puzzled; he had not expected his father to send him upstairs to inquire after Amar, and he had not imagined that Amar could possibly be in good spirits. Amar knew his brother. Mustapha would go on being troubled by this small mystery until he had solved it. And that
Amar had no intention of allowing him to do. Indeed, he himself could not have told what was in his heart regarding Mustapha, save that on some remote, as yet invisible horizon he divined the certitude of victory for himself, and a total defeat for his brother.

And now there came to his mind an incident which his mother had recounted to him many times. Long ago, when her father had been on his deathbed in this room where Amar now lay, and the whole family was gathered there to say good-bye to him, the old man had commanded Mustapha to approach the bed, so that he might bestow his blessing on the first-born. But Mustapha had been a headstrong, sulky child; whining, he had hidden beneath his mother’s skirts, and no amount of cajoling could induce him to go near the bed. It was a shameful moment, miraculously saved by Amar, who for some unaccountable reason had suddenly toddled across the room and kissed his grandfather’s hand. Immediately the old man had bestowed his blessing on Amar instead of Mustapha; not content with that, he had gone on to prophesy that the baby would grow up to be a much better man than his brother. A few minutes later he had drawn his last breath. The story had always greatly impressed Amar, but since he was fairly certain that neither of his parents had ever told it to Mustapha, it had not been fully satisfactory as a consolation for the twenty-six sheep. But now he thought of it again, and it began to assume an importance he had not perceived before. What were twenty-six sheep, or, indeed, a hundred sheep, compared to the magic power of a blessing sent direct to him by Allah through the heart and lips of his grandfather? In the darkness he murmured a short prayer for the departed, and an even shorter one of thanks for his own good fortune.

That night in the bowl of soup his mother brought him there were almonds as well as chickpeas. He longed to know whether the whole family was having them too, or whether they had been bought especially for him and for him alone, but he did not dare ask. He could imagine his mother running downstairs in a fit of laughter, crying: “Now Master Amar imagines that
we went out and bought the almonds just for him and that nobody else is having any!” There would be even louder laughter from his sister and Mustapha. “What good soup,” he remarked.

CHAPTER 3

The next morning he felt perfectly well. He got up very early and went out onto the roof to look over the wall at the city spread out around him. Fog lay in the valley. A few of the higher minarets pushed up from the sea of grayness below like green fingers pointing skyward, and the hills on both sides were visible, with their raw earth and their rows of tiny olive trees. But the bowl where the center of the city lay was still brimming with the nocturnal, unmoving fog. He stood awhile looking, letting the fresh early air bathe his face and chest, and he said a few holy words as he turned his head in the direction of Bab Fteuh. Beyond the gate was the waste land by the cemetery where he played soccer, and then the village of reed huts where there were many goats, and then the wheatfields leading gently down toward the river, and then the mud villages under the high clay cliffs. And if you went farther there was a sort of canyon-land all made of clay, where in the spring after the rains the water rushed through, often carrying with it drowned sheep and even cows.

In this region there were no plants at all—only the clay with its deep crevasses and crazy turrets made by the rain. Beyond this were great mountains where the Berbers lived, and then desert, and other lands whose names only a few people could tell you, and then, of course, behind everything, in the center of
the world, shining in an eternal unearthly light, there was Mecca. How many hours he had spent examining the bright chromolithographs that lined the walls of the barber shops! Some were of historic battles waged by Moslems against demons; some showed magnificent flying horses with women’s heads and breasts—it was on these animals that important people used to travel before they discarded them for airplanes—some were of Adam and Eve, the first Moslems in the world, or of Jerusalem, the great holy city where Christians and Jews were still murdering Moslems every day and putting their flesh in tins to be shipped abroad and sold as food; but there was always a picture, more beautiful than any, of Mecca, with its sharp crags above and its tiers of high houses topped with terraces and studded with balconies, its arcades and lamps and giant pigeons, and finally, in the center, the great rock draped with black cloth, which was of such beauty that many men fainted, or even died, on beholding it. Often at night he had stood in this very spot, his hands on the wall, straining his eyes as he peered into the star-filled darkness of the sky, trying to imagine that he saw at least a faint glimmer of the light which streamed up forever into the heavens from the sacred shrine.

Usually from the terrace he could hear the shrill voices and the drums from the market at Sidi Ali bou Ralem. Today, what with the fog, only the sounds from the immediate neighborhood were audible. He went back into his room, lay down on his bed, resting his feet against the wall above his head, and began to play his flute: no particular tune—merely an indeterminate, neutral succession of notes with an occasional long wait—the music for the particular way he felt on this cool, misty morning. When this had gone on for a while, he suddenly jumped up and dressed himself in the only European outfit he owned: a pair of old military trousers and a heavy woolen sweater, along with a pair of sandals he had bought in the Mellah—these last he slipped under his arm, as they were to be put on only when he got into the middle of town, away from the danger of enemy attacks in the streets of his own quarter. It was easier to fight, and to walk, for that matter, barefoot, unencumbered by the weight
of shoes. A friend had given him a leather wrist strap which he wore on gala occasions, pretending it had a watch with it. He looked at it for a moment, decided against it, combed his hair carefully, glancing into a pocket mirror which was hung on the wall, and tiptoed down the two flights of stairs into the courtyard. When his mother saw him she called out: “Come and eat breakfast! You think you’re going out without eating first?”

He was extremely hungry, but without knowing why, he had wanted to get out of the house immediately, before he had to speak to anyone, and change the way he felt. However, it was too late now. He sat down and ate the boiled oats with cinnamon bark and goat’s milk that his little sister brought him. She squatted in the doorway, looking slyly at him now and then out of the corner of her eye. There were streaks of henna on her temples and forehead, and her hands were brick red with the dye. She was old enough to be given in marriage; already two offers had come in, but old Si Driss would not hear of it, partly because he wanted to see her around the house a bit longer (it seemed only last year that she had been born), and partly because neither of the offers had been substantial enough to consider seriously. Amar’s mother was in complete agreement with her husband; the longer she could forestall the marriage the happier she would be. It was no pleasure to have sons because they were never home; they bolted their food and disappeared, and when they grew older one could not even know whether they would return to sleep or not. But a daughter, since she was not allowed to stir from the house alone, even to fetch a kilo of sugar from the shop next door, could always be counted on to be there when one needed her. In any case, each year that passed gave Halima more charms: her eyes seemed to grow larger and her hair thicker and glossier.

When he had eaten, Amar got up and went out into the courtyard. There he petted his two pigeons for a while, watching his mother in the hope that she would go upstairs, so that his departure would be unnoticed by her. Finally he decided to go out anyway.

“It may rain,” she called as he reached the door.

“It’s not going to rain,” he said. “
B’slemah
.” He knew she wanted to say more—anything at all, so long as the conversation kept him there. It was always this way when he came to go out. He smiled over his shoulder and shut the door behind him. There were three turnings in the alley before it got to the street. At the second he came face to face with his father. As Amar was stooping to kiss his hand, the old man pulled it quickly away.

“How did you awaken, my boy?” he said. They exchanged greetings, and Si Driss looked penetratingly at his son. “I want to talk to you,” he said.

“Naam, sidi.”

“Where are you going?”

Amar had no destination in his head. “Just for a walk.”

“This is not a world just to go for a walk in. You’re a man, you know, not a boy any longer. Think this over, and be home for lunch, because this afternoon you’re going with me to see Abderrahman Rabati.”

Amar inclined his head and walked on. But the joy of being in the street in the morning was gone. Rabati was a big, loudmouthed man who often got work for the boys of the quarter with the French in the Ville Nouvelle, and Amar had heard countless stories of how difficult the work was, how the French were constantly in a bad humor and found pretexts for not paying when the end of the week came, and as if that were not bad enough, how Rabati himself habitually extracted small tributes from the boys in return for having found them their jobs. Besides, Amar knew no French beyond “
bon jour, m’sieu,” “en trez
,” and
“fermez la porte,”
expressions taught him by a well-meaning friend, and it was common knowledge that the boys who did not understand French were treated even worse, made the butt of jokes not only by the French but by the boys who were fortunate enough to know the language.

He turned into the principal street of the quarter, nodded to the mint-seller, and looked unhappily around him, not even sure any longer that he wanted to take a walk. His father’s words had spread a film of poison over the morning landscape.

There was only one way out, and that was to find himself some sort of work immediately, so that when he went home for lunch he would be able to say: “Father, I’m working.”

He turned left and went up the dusty hill past the great carved façade of the old mosque, and, further on, the concrete box that had been the scene of so many afternoons of childhood pleasure, the cinema, plastered with shiny photographs of men with guns. Then he turned left again through a narrow street jammed with waiting donkeys and men pushing wheelbarrows, whose downhill course shortly burrowed beneath the houses. Presently he came out into a vast open place dotted here and there with circular towers. It was like a burning village: greasy black smoke poured from the turrets of baked earth. Boys in rags ran back and forth carrying armfuls of green branches which they stuffed into the doors of the ovens. The smoke billowed and hovered in the air close to the ground, not seeming willing to venture upward toward the gray sky. In a further corner, built against the high ramparts of the city, was a section where the ovens had been constructed on two levels. There was a stairway onto the enormous flat mud roof, and he climbed up to survey the scene. Near by in the doorway of a small shed crouched a bearded man. Amar turned and spoke to him.

“Any work for me?”

The man stared at him for a moment without showing any interest. Then he said: “Who are you?”