The Spider's House (8 page)

“Hamdoul’lah
,” said Amar.

“Do you like your work?”

“Yes, master.”

“I hope you’ll stay with me,” the man said. It cost him an effort to go on, but he managed it. After all, he told himself, it was surely Allah who had made him take the boy on; he had not believed he was a Cherif and had the
baraka
, and he could not remember now what had prompted him to be friendly to him. If Allah were involved it would be safer to be generous. “Suppose I double your wages.”

“If it is Allah’s will,” said Amar, “I should be very happy.”

The man pulled a small ring from his pocket and held it forth to Amar. “Put this on your finger,” he said. “A little gift. No one can ever say that Said is not grateful for favors shown him by Allah.”

“Thank you very much,” said Amar, slipping the ring on to various fingers to try the size and appearance. “There’s one thing I’d like to know. When does the new wage go into effect? Beginning today or beginning the first day I came to work for you?”

The man stared at him, was about to say something harsh, but decided not to, and instead shrugged his shoulders.

“It can begin at the beginning if you like,” he said; in spite of the fact that he did not particularly like Amar, he was determined to keep him on with him if possible. It was not only the divine favor of which the boy seemed to be a symbol, but also the fact of the sales. Although the two could be considered facets of the same thing, he preferred to try to think of them separately: it was more acceptable to Allah.

“If it’s not worth it to you …” Amar began.

“Of course it is. Of course it is,” he protested.

“The day you have no money, I’ll work for you without pay, twice as hard, so that Allah may favor us with money again.”

The potter thanked him for his generosity and turned to go out.

“Six days at twenty rial,” Amar was thinking. “He gave me fifty. He still owes me seventy. And twenty-five still for Yazami
… bel haq
, not yet … Why doesn’t he just pay, instead of talking so much?” And he determined to get the money that night.

“Master!” he cried, to stop the man from going through the
door. The potter looked at him, surprised. Now Amar had to go on. It was an unheard-of thing, but he was going to ask his employer to sit with him in a café. And the words he heard himself saying probably astonished him more than they did the older man.

“All right,” said the potter. When the day was finished they went together to a café near Bab Sidi bou Jida, where there was a small garden in the back, through which one of the myriad channels of the river had been directed. Weeping willows and young plum trees edged the stream, and one small light bulb hung from a trellis overhead, almost buried in grape leaves. The mat where they seated themselves was only a few centimeters from the swift surface of the water.

Amar ordered the tea with dignity; he was bursting with a pride and a delight which he took pains to conceal. It occurred to him that he would be still happier if he did not have ahead of him the problem of finding the right chink in the conversation where he could gain a foothold for reasonably requesting the money, and he was momentarily tempted to let it go for this time, and relax in the pleasure of the occasion. But then he reminded himself that the only reason for the invitation was to get his wages, and sighing, he steeled himself to go through with the business at hand.

The potter told him about his two sons, his altercation with a neighbor which had amounted almost to a feud, and finally about his great dream, which was to make the
hadj,
the pilgrimage to Mecca. Amar became enthusiastic; his eyes shone.

“To go there by Allah’s grace, and then die happy in your heart,” Amar whispered, a beatific smile on his lips. He leaned back, closed his eyes. “A
l-lah!”

“Not this year,” said the potter meaningfully.

“Perhaps next year there will be enough money.
Incha’Allah.”

The man snorted. Then he leaned forward, putting his lips close to Amar’s ear. “It’s all right here. There’s no one listening.”

Amar did not understand, but he smiled and looked around the dim little garden. How peaceful it was, with the light evening breeze stirring the small leaves of the grapevine that clustered
around the electric bulb, making the shadows move and change on the yellow mat below. For a moment he pushed aside the thought of money. From time to time the dark water beside them rippled audibly, as if a tiny fish had come to the surface for an instant and then darted beneath. It was in peaceful moments such as this, his father had said, that men were given to know just a little of what paradise was like, so that they might yearn for it with all their soul, and strive during their time on earth to be worthy of going there. He felt utterly comfortable and happy; soon the hot mint tea would be carried out to them, and he had asked for a sprig of verbena to be put in each glass. And when he had the money he would begin looking for real European shoes, and sell his Jewish sandals….

“No, not this year,” the man resumed, a wicked light suddenly in his eyes. “May their race rot in Hell.”

Amar looked at him in surprise. If anyone said that, he could mean only the French, but he was not aware that the man had made any previous allusion to them. As he turned the subject over in his mind, he was conscious that the potter was staring at him with a nascent suspicion.

“Don’t you know about Ibn Saud?” he asked suddenly. “Have you never heard of him?”

“Of course,” said Amar, stung by the tone of the other’s voice. “The Sultan of the Hejaz.”

“Huwa hada
,” said the man, “but I can see you don’t know anything about what’s going on in the world. You should wake up, boy. There are great things happening. Ibn Saud is a man with a head. This year not a single
hadji
from Morocco has got into Mecca. They all got as far as Djedda and had to turn back,”

“Poor things,” said Amar, commiserating immediately.

“Poor things?” the man cried. “Poor donkeys! They should have stayed home. Is this a year to go off to Mecca, when that filthy carrion of a dog they gave us is still sitting there on the Sultan’s throne? No, I swear if I had power I’d shut the doors of every mosque in the country until we get our Sultan back. And if that doesn’t bring him, you know what will.”

Amar did indeed know. The man meant
jihad,
the wholesale
slaughter by every Moslem of all available unbelievers. He sat silent, a little stunned by the man’s violence. By no means was he unaware of the fact that the French had put a false monarch on the throne of his country; he assumed that everyone in the world knew that. He resented the indignity the same as anyone else, but he did so without giving the matter any thought. In his experience the substitution of Ben Arafa for Sidi Mohammed had not altered anything; the reason was that he had not come in contact with anyone who had strong political convictions. His father had fulminated against unbelievers and their evil work in Morocco ever since he could remember, and this new bit of malevolence on their part—to kidnap the Sultan and hold him prisoner on an island in the sea, replacing him with a doddering old man who might as well be deaf, dumb and blind—was merely the most recent in a long list of hostile acts on their part.

But now he saw for the first time that there were men who gave it much more than a passing glance, for whom it was more than a concept, a string of words about a distant happening; he saw the symbolic indignity turn into a personal affront, disapproval transformed into rage. The man sat there glaring at him, a vague shadow, that of a grape leaf, played across his wrinkled forehead. An owl suddenly uttered an absurd, melancholy sound in the canebrake across the stream, and Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation, and it had always been there with them and in them, as intangible and as real as the night around them. Amar pulled two loose cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to the potter. “Ah, the Moslems, the Moslems!” he sighed. “Who knows what’s going to happen to them?”

“Who knows?” said the man, lighting the cigarette. When the
qaouaji
brought their tea they drank it without speaking, slowly.

The breeze blew harder, bringing with it the chill odors of the higher air on the mountains. It was not until after they had separated in the street that Amar realized he had forgotten to ask the man for his money. He shrugged his shoulders and went home to dinner.

CHAPTER 5

The young spring grew, wheeled along toward summer, bringing drier nights, a higher sun and longer days. And along with the numberless infinitesimal natural things that announced the slow seasonal change, there was another thing, quite as impalpable and just as perceptible. Perhaps if Amar had not been made aware of it by the potter, he could have continued for a while not suspecting its presence, but now he wondered how it had been possible for him to go on as long as he had without noticing it. One might have said that it hung in the air with the particles of dust, and settled with them into the pores of the walls, so completely was it a part of the light and atmosphere of the great town lying sprawled there between its hills. But it expressed itself in the startled look over the shoulder that followed the tap on the back, in the silence that fell over a café when an unfamiliar figure appeared and sat down, in the anguished glances that darted from one pair of eyes to another when the family, squatting around the evening
tajine
, ceased chewing at the sound of a knock on the door. People went out less; at night the twisting lanes of the Medina were empty, and Friday afternoons, when there should have been many thousands of people, all in their best clothing, in the Djenane es Sebir—the men walking hand in hand or in noisy groups among the fountains and across the bridges between the islands, the women sitting in tiers on the steps or on the benches in their own reserved bamboo grove—there were only a few unkempt kif-smokers who sat staring vacantly in front of them
while urchins scuffed up the dust as they kicked around an improvised football made of rags and string.

It was strange to see the city slowly withering, like some doomed plant. Each day it seemed that the process could go no further, that the point of extreme withdrawal from normal life had been reached, that an opening-up would now begin; but each new day people realized with a kind of awe that no such point was in sight.

They wanted their own Sultan back—that went without saying—and in general they had faith in the political party that had pledged to bring about his return. Also, a certain amount of intrigue and secrecy had never frightened them; the people of Fez were well known to be the most devious and clever Moslems in Morocco. But scheming in their own traditional fashion was one thing, and being caught between the diabolical French colonial secret police and the pitiless Istiqlal was another. They were not used to living in an
ambiance
of suspicion and fear quite so intense as the state of affairs their politicians were now asking them to accept as an everyday condition.

Slowly life was assuming a monstrous texture. Nothing was necessarily what it seemed; everything had become suspect—particularly that which was pleasant. If a man smiled, beware of him because he was surely a
chkam
, an informer for the French. If he plucked on an
oud
as he walked through the street he was being disrespectful to the memory of the exiled Sultan. If he smoked a cigarette in public he was contributing to French revenue, and he risked a beating or a knifing later in some dark alley. The thousands of students from the Medersa Karouine and the College of Moulay Idriss went so far as to declare an unlimited period of national mourning, and took to walking morosely by themselves, muttering a few inaudible syllables to each other when they met.

For Amar it was difficult to accept this sudden transition. Why should there be no more drums beaten, no flutes played, in the market at Sidi Ali bou Ralem, through which he liked to pass on his way home from work? He knew it was necessary to drive the French out, but he had always imagined that this would be done
gloriously, with thousands of men on horseback flashing their swords and calling upon Allah to aid them in their holy mission as they rode down the Boulevard Moulay Youssef toward the Ville Nouvelle. And the Sultan would get an army from the Germans or the Americans and return victorious to his throne in Rabat. It was hard to see any connection between the splendid war of liberation and all this whispering and frowning. For a long time he debated with himself whether to discuss his doubts with the potter. He was earning good wages now and was on excellent terms with his master. Since the night several weeks ago when they had gone to the café, he had attempted no further consolidation of intimate friendship, because he was not sure that he really liked Said. It seemed to him partly the man’s fault that everything was going wrong in the town, and he could not help feeling that had he never known him, somehow his own life would be different now.

He decided finally to take the risk of speaking with him, but at the same time to make sure that his real question was masked with another.

One afternoon he and Saïd had locked themselves into the upper shed to have a cigarette together. (No one smoked any more save in the strictest secrecy, because the Istiqlal’s decision to destroy the French government’s tobacco monopoly provided not only for the burning of the warehouses and all shops that sold tobacco, but also for the enforcement by violence of the party’s anti-smoking campaign. The commonest punishment for being caught smoking was to have your cheek slashed with a razor.) Being shut into this small space with his master, and sharing with him the delightful sensation of danger which their forbidden activity occasioned, gave Amar the impetus to speak. He turned to the older man and said nonchalantly: “What do you think of the story that the Istiqlal may sell out to the French?”