The Spider's House

  He did not have the money; he would not go to the café and listen to further threats. He would go straight home and receive the beating so that it would become a thing of the past, rather than of the future. Behind him he heard the warning bell of a bicycle, and he turned to recognize a boy he knew. The boy stopped and he got on, sitting sidewise in front of the rider. Around the curves they coasted, one way and the other, with the sun-filled valley and Djebel Zalagh first on the left, then on the right.

  “How are the brakes?” Amar asked. He was thinking that it might be pleasanter to be catapulted into a ditch or down the hillside than to be delivered safely to the gate of his quarter. Whatever he was going to be punished for might be forgiven when he got out of the hospital.

  “The brakes are good,” the boy replied. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid?”

  Amar laughed scornfully. They crossed the bridge and the ground became level. The boy began to pedal. As they approached the uphill stretch from the river valley to the Taza road intersection, the work got to be too arduous. Amar jumped off, said good-bye, and took a cross-cut through a grove of pomegranate trees. He had never owned a bicycle; it was not an object the son of an impoverished fqih could ever hope to have. Money came only to those who bought and sold. The boys whose fathers owned shops could own bicycles; Amar could only rent one now and then, because the people whom his father treated with his holy words and incantations generally had only coppers to spare, and when an occasional rich man consulted him and attempted to give him a larger sum in payment, Si Driss was adamant in his refusal.

  “When your money comes from Allah,” his father would tell him, “you do not buy machines and other Nazarene follies. You buy bread, and you give thanks to Him for being able to do that.” And Amar would answer: “Hamdoul’lah.”

  At a café just inside Bab Fteuh he stopped and watched a card game for a few minutes. Then he walked miserably home. His mother, who let him in, looked meaningfully at him, and he saw his father standing in the courtyard by the well. There was no sign of Mustapha.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Come upstairs,” said his father, leading the way up the narrow flight of broken steps. He went into the smaller of the two rooms and switched on the light. “Sit on the mattress,” he commanded, pointing at a corner of the room. Amar obeyed. Everything within him was trembling; he could not have told whether it was with eagerness or terror, any more than he could have known whether it was a consuming hatred or an overpowering love that he felt for the elderly man who towered above him, his eyes fiery with anger. Slowly his father unwound his long turban, revealing his shaven skull, and while he did this he spoke.

  “This time you have committed an unpardonable sin,” he said, fixing Amar with his terrible eyes. The pointed white beard looked strange with no turban above to balance it. “Only Hell lies before a boy like you. All the money in the house, that was to buy bread for your father and your family. Take off your djellaba.” Amar removed the garment, and the old man snatched it from him, looking inside the hood as he did so. “Take off your serrouelle.” Amar unfastened his belt and stepped out of his trousers, holding one hand in front of him to cover his nakedness. His father felt through the pockets, found them empty save for the broken penknife Amar always carried with him.

  “Gone! All of it!” shouted the old man.

  Amar said nothing.

  “Where is it? Where is it?” The voice rose higher at each syllable. Amar merely looked into his father’s eyes, his mouth open. There were a hundred things to say; there was nothing to say. He felt as if he had been turned to stone.

  With astonishing force the old man pushed him down onto the mattress, and ripping the belt from the trousers, began to flail him with the buckle end. To protect his face, Amar threw himself over upon his belly, his hands cupped across the back of his head. The hard blows came down upon his knuckles, his shoulders, his back, his buttocks, his legs.

  “I hope I kill you!” his father screamed. “You’d be better dead!”

  I hope he does, Amar thought. He felt the lashes from a great distance. It was as if a voice were saying to him: “This is pain,” and he were agreeing, but he was not convinced. The old man said no more, putting all his energy into the blows. Behind the swish of the belt in the air and the sound of the buckle hitting his flesh Amar heard a cat on the terrace above, calling: “Rao … rao … rao …,” the cries of children, and a radio somewhere playing an old record of Farid al Atrache. He could smell the tajine his mother was cooking down in the courtyard: cinnamon and onions. The blows kept coming. All at once he felt he must breathe; he had not yet drawn breath since he had been thrown upon the mattress. He sighed deeply and found himself vomiting. He raised his head, tried to move, and the pain forced him back down. Still the rhythmical beating continued, whether with less intensity or more he could not tell. His face slid about in the mess beneath it; behind his eyelids he had a vision. He was running down the Boulevard Poëymirau in the Ville Nouvelle with a sword in his hand. As he passed each shop the plate glass of the show window shattered of its own accord. The French women screamed; the men stood paralyzed. Here and there he struck at a man, severing his head, and a fountain of bright blood shot up out of the truncated neck. A hot wave of fierce delight surged through him. Suddenly he realized that all the women were naked. With dexterous upward thrusts of his blade he opened their bodies; with downward thrusts he removed their breasts. Not one must be left intact.

  The beating had stopped. His father had gone out of the room. The radio was still playing the same piece, and he heard his parents talking below. He lay completely still. For a moment he thought perhaps he was really dead. Then he heard his mother enter the room. “Ouildi, ouildi,” she said, and her two hands began to touch him softly, rubbing oil over his skin. He had not cried out once during the beating, but now he found himself sobbing fiercely. To be able to stop, he imagined his father above his mother, looking on. The ruse worked, and he lay there quietly, submitting to the strong, gentle hands.

  He was sick the next day, and the following. As he lay in his little room on the roof, his mother came many times with oil and rubbed his bruises. He was dizzy with fever and miserable with pain, and he had no desire for food, other than the soup and hot tea she brought him from time to time. The third day he sat up and played his lirah, the reed flute he had made. That day his mother let Diki bou Bnara, his pet rooster, out of his crate, and the magnificent bird wandered in and out of the room, strutting about, scratching and listening to Amar’s songs in his praise. But the third day at sunset, when Diki bou Bnara had been chased back into his cage and the muezzins had finished calling the maghreb, Amar heard his father’s footsteps approaching as they mounted the stairway to the roof. He quickly turned over to face the wall, pretending to be asleep. Then his father was in the room, speaking.

  “Ya ouildi! Ya Amar!”

  Amar did not move, but his heart beat fast and his breathing was difficult. The mattress moved as his father sat down by Amar’s feet.

  “Amar!”

  Amar stirred, rubbed his eyes.

  “I want to talk with you. But first I want to be sure that you have no hatred. I am very unhappy with what you have done. Your mother and your brother and your sister have not had enough food these last days. That is nothing. That’s not why I want to talk with you. You must listen. Have you any hatred in your heart for me?”

  Amar sat up. “No, Father,” he said quietly.

  The old man was silent for a moment. Diki bou Bnara suddenly crowed.

  “I want to make you understand. Bel haq, fel louwil…. First, you have to know that I understand. Perhaps you think that because I am old I know nothing about the world, how the world has changed.”

  Amar murmured a protest, but his father continued.

  “I know you think that. All boys do. And now the world has changed more than ever before. Everything is new. Everything is bad. We’re suffering more than we’ve ever suffered. And it is w
ritten that we must suffer still more. All that is nothing. Like the wind. You think I have never been to Dar Debibagh, never seen how the French have their life. But what if I tell you I have, many times? What if I say I have seen their cafés and their shops, and walked in their streets, ridden in their buses, the same as you?”

  Amar was astonished. He had taken it for granted that since the arrival of the French soldiers many years ago, his father had never gone outside the walls of the Medina, save to the country or to the Mellah to buy ingredients for his medicines which only certain Jews sold. Ever since he could remember, the schedule of his father’s life had been the same, had consisted of the five trips a day he made to the mosque, together with the hours he spent in conversation at the shops of friends en route to and from the mosque. Outside of that there was nothing, save the administering of his services when they were required. It was surprising to hear him say he had been to the French town. Amar doubted it: if he had been there, why had he never mentioned it until now?

  “I want you to know that I have been there many times. I have seen their Christian filth and shame. It can never be for us. I swear they’re worse than Jews. No, I swear by Allah they’re lower than the godless Jews of the Mellah! And so if I speak against them it’s not because of what men like Si Kaddour and that carrion Abdeltif and the other Wattanine have told me. What they say may be the truth, but their reason for saying it is a lie, because it is politique. You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the French say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the Friends of Independence, say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. All lies are sins. And so, which displeases Allah more, a lie told by a Nazarene, who doesn’t know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by a Moslem, who does?”

  Now Amar thought he saw where his father’s words were leading. He was warning him against associating with certain of his friends, with whom he sometimes played soccer or went to the cinema, and who were known to be members of the Istiqlal. His father was afraid Amar would be put in prison like Abdallah Tazi and his cousin, who had shouted: “A bas les Français!” in the Café de la Renaissance one night. How wrong he was, Amar thought with a tinge of bitterness. There was not even the remotest chance of such a thing. That possibility had been ruled out for him from the beginning because he spoke no French and could neither read nor write. He knew nothing, not even how to sign his own name in Arabic. Maybe he’ll stop talking now and go downstairs, he thought.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “I understand,” Amar replied, twisting the sheet between his toes. He felt better; he would have liked to go out and walk a bit, but he knew that if he got up he would no longer feel like going out. Through the iron grillwork of the window he could see the flat rooftops of a distant corner of the city, with a square of darkening sky above.

  “It is worse for a Moslem to lie,” resumed his father. “And who among all the Moslems commits the greatest sin if he lies or steals? A Cherif. And thanks to Allah you are a Cherif….”

  “Hamdoul’lah,” murmured Amar, obediently but with feel ing. “Thanks to Allah.”

  “Not only Hamdoul’lah, Hamdoul’lah! No! You must become a man and be a Cherif. The Cherif lives for his people. I Would rather see you dead than growing to be like the carrion you talk with in the street. Dead! Do you understand?” The old man’s voice rose. “There will be no more Moslems unless every young Cherif obeys the laws of Allah.”

  He went on in this vein. Amar understood and silently agreed, but at the same time he could not keep himself from thinking: “He doesn’t know what the world is like today.” The thought that his own conception of the world was so different from his father’s was like a protecting wall around his entire being. When his father went out into the street he had only the mosque, the Koran, the other old men in his mind. It was the immutable world of law, the written word, unchanging beneficence, but it was in some way wrinkled and dried up. Whereas when Amar stepped out the door there was the whole vast earth waiting, the live, mysterious earth, that belonged to him in a way it could belong to no one else, and where anything at all might happen. The smell of the morning breeze moving in across the walls from the olive groves, the sound of the river falling over the rocks as it rushed in its canyons through the heart of the city, the moving shadows of the trees on the white dust beneath, when he sat at midday in their shelter—such things had a particular message for him that they could not have for anyone else, least of all his father. The world where the old man lived, he imagined, must look something like a picture in one of those newspapers that were smuggled in from Egypt: gray, smudged, meaningless save as an accompaniment to the written text.

  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.