The Spider's House

  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! Zid! Zid! Vas-y!” It was along here that Amar suddenly became aware of someone walking behind him, softly saying his name: “Amar! 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 gen
tleman 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.

  All at once the car was filled with a sweet smell, like flowers, as the lady opened a small bag she carried with her, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Fez lay far below, wrapped in darkness, its presence betrayed only here and there by a feeble reddish gleam—a lamp in some window or a fire in a courtyard, visible for the fraction of a second as the taxi moved ahead, following the sinuous course of the road along the edge of the cliffs.

  They came to the summit, where the ruined tombs of the Merinide royal family looked down across the olive groves and the eastern end of the city. The broken domes stood out black and jagged against the limpid night sky. Amar recalled the last time he had come down these slopes and rounded these curves: he had been on his way home to a beating. He smiled as he remembered how the boy steering the bicycle had misunderstood his query about the brakes, had imagined Amar was afraid it might go off the road, when actually he had been hoping that it would do just that, catapulting them both into a ravine. And he smiled again when he thought of how very seriously he had taken the prospect of that beating, whereas now, he decided, it would mean nothing to him, save the sadness he would feel at being the object of his father’s displeasure, for he had grown up a good deal since then. But had he grown up entirely? For an instant he was sufficiently detached to be able to pose the question. In his pocket was a paper of kif, part of a long-term project of vengeance against Mustapha, in retaliation for that very beating. Would it not be pleasing to Allah if he should suddenly toss it out the window at this moment? But Bab Jamaï then appeared below in a confusion of moving lights, and the thought slipped out of his head to be replaced by the more real preoccupation with what might happen if the police should insist on pulling him from the taxi. This was the most dangerous spot, because it was here that they had to go into the Medina. They had arrived at the gate. The driver came to a halt and shut off the motor. A flashlight was played into their faces and then around the interior of the taxi, and a French soldier poked his head through the back window, exchanging a few words with the man and the woman. “Et cet arabe-là,” he said, indicating Amar with the faintly contemptuous familiarity of proprietorship, “he is your personal servant?” And although Amar did not understand the words, he knew perfectly well what the soldier had said. Both the foreigners replied yes, that was the case. “Vous pouvez continuer à l’hôtel,” he told them, and the car started up and went ahead the hundred yards to the hotel gateway.

  And then began for Amar a strange series of confused impressions. Led by his new friends, he passed through two small courtyards and up two flights of carpeted stairs to an endless corridor, also carpeted, so that their footsteps made no sound. And there was expensive reed matting covering the walls all along the way, and lanterns overhead such as were found only in the Karouine Mosque or the Zaouia of Moulay Idriss. And then they opened two great doors of glass and went down a few steps into a room which was like nothing he had ever seen, but which, he decided, could not have been made for anyone but a sultan. The intricacies of the high domed ceiling were only faintly illumined by the many-colored rays of light that streamed from the colossal lanterns overhead; it was like being in a vast and perfect cave. He had only a short moment to look around as they crossed the room, and then they were out in another corridor climbing another flight of stairs, this time very old ones of mosaic, and without carpeting—rather like the stairs in his own house, except that the edges of the steps were of white marble instead of wood. The man and woman spoke in low voices as they climbed, Amar behind them. At the top of the stairs there was another corridor, less beautiful than the one below.

  Then the man opened a door and they were in the room. “Go in,” he said to Amar, breaking the long silence that had been between them. He spoke to the woman, urging her to enter, too. After some hesitation she finally agreed, and she and the man sat down in two large chairs. Amar remained standing by the door, looking at the magnificent room. “Sit down,” the man said to him. He obeyed, seating himself on the floor at the spot where he had been standing, and continued his careful examination of the carvings on the beams overhead and the fancy painted plaster frieze of geometric designs. The rugs were thick, the heavy curtains hid the windows, and on the bed the covers had been pulled back to reveal the whiteness of clean sheets.

  Now the man looked at him closely for the first time, took out a pack of cigarettes, and after offering the woman one, tossed the pack to Amar. “What’s the matter with your nose and eyes?” he asked him. “Have you had a fight?” Amar laughed and said: “Yes.” He was embarrassed, and he longed to get up and look into the mirror over the washstand, but he sat still and smoked. The man’s manner of casual familiarity with him was assuredly designed to put him at his ease, and he was grateful to him for it; however, the presence of the woman made him nervous. She kept looking at him and smiling in a way that he found disconcerting. It was the way a mother smiles at her small child in a public place when many people are watching and she hopes that it will continue to behave properly. He supposed she meant it to be friendly and reassuring, perhaps even an encouragement, a promise of future intimacy if ever they should find themselves alone. But to him it was a shameless and indecent way for her to behave in front of the man, now that they were all three seated in his bedroom, and he felt that out of deference to his host he should pretend to ignore her smiles. Unfortunately she would have none of this; the less attention he paid her, the more determinedly she kept at him, grimacing, wrinkling her nose at him like a rabbit, blowing smoke toward him as she laughed at things the man said, and generally behaving in an increasingly shocking fashion. And the man went on talking, as if he were completely unaware of what she was doing—not pretending, not indifferent, either, but truly unaware.

  Amar was embarrassed for them all, but particularly for the man. He disapproved likewise of the fact that the man and the woman presently embarked on a long and occasionally stormy conversation regarding him; he knew he was the subject by the glances they gave him while they were talking. Being with them was going to be difficult, he could see that, but he was determined to show a maximum of patience. It was the least he could do in return for having been offered protection, shelter and food in this time of hardship. The discussion appeared to be one concerning food, for suddenly without any pause or transition the man said to him: “Would you mind eating alone in this room?” He answered that he would not mind at all—that, indeed, he t
hought it the best idea. The man seemed relieved upon hearing his reply, but the woman began to make silly gestures meaning that he ought to go downstairs and eat with them. While she did this the man glowered. Amar had no intention of accompanying them to any public room where he would be on view to the French and the Moroccans who worked in the hotel. He smiled amiably and said: “This is a good room for eating.” For a while the conversation between the two became more animated; then the woman got up petulantly and walked to the door, where she turned and waved coyly at Amar before she went out. The man stepped into the corridor with her for a moment, came back in, and shut the door. His expression was one of annoyance as he took up the telephone and spoke briefly into it.

  Amar had been studying the patterns in the rug beside him; he had decided it was the most beautiful object in the room.

  When he had hung up the receiver, the man sat down again, heaved a deep sigh, and lit another cigarette. Amar looked up at him.

  “Why do you talk so much with that woman?” he said, the expression of his voice a mixture of shyness and curiosity. “Words are for people, not for women.”

  The man laughed. “Aren’t women people?” he asked.

  “People are people,” Amar said stolidly. “Women are women. It’s not the same thing.”

  The man looked very surprised, and laughed more loudly. Then his face became serious; he leaned forward in the chair. “If women aren’t people,” he said slowly, “how does it happen they can go to Paradise?”

  Amar looked at him suspiciously: the man could scarcely be that ignorant. But he could discern no mockery in his face. “El hassil,” he began, “they have their own place in Heaven. They don’t go inside where the men are.”

  “I see,” the man said gravely. “It’s like the mosques, is that it?”