“No, no, no,” said Stenham. “They might kill me, because I’m a Nazarene, but why should they kill you? You’re a good Moslem. You’re just earning your living.”
Rhaissa was not consoled. She could think of too many good Moslems who had been earning their living working for the Nazarenes, and who had been shot down or stabbed without a chance to defend themselves; the fact that they had been working for the police was not relevant in her mind. “Aymah!” she wailed. “This is a very bad day!”
When he had finally got rid of her he went to the window and listened. The day was like any other day, the same sleepy sounds rose up from the Medina: the distant droning of the sawmill, donkeys braying, here and there a snatch of Egyptian song from a radio, and the cries of children. In the garden sparrows chirped. He sat down to work, found it impossible, and silently cursed Rhaissa. Then he tried lying in the sun for a while, with the hope that it might relax him, or start the flow of thought, or whatever it was he needed. But for the past week or ten days the weather had been too hot for sunbathing, and surely it was too hot today. The sweat ran down all the creases of his flesh, wet the cushions of the chairs. So he began to type letters at the table in the center of the room, lifting his gaze at frequent intervals to let it run unthinkingly across the panorama of hills and walls. After an hour or so, he slowly became conscious of the fact that he was spending most of his time looking out at the Medina. He incorporated the discovery in the letter, in one of those apologetic passages a person is wont to include when he feels that the missive he is engaged in writing, as a result of inattention or interruptions, is not going to be as well composed as it should be. “This is the damnedest place for trying to concentrate. It’s quiet, but that seems to count for nothing. Even while I’m writing this I find myself stopping every other minute to stare out the window. It isn’t to admire the view, because I don’t even see it. I know it by heart. You can imagine how much worse it is when I’m trying to work….”
He stopped again and reread what he had typed. It was absurd; he would have done better to try to find out why he kept staring out at the Medina. What did he think of that vast object out there, shining in the morning sun? He knew it was a medieval city, and he knew that he loved it, but that had nothing to do with what went on below the surface of his mind as he sat looking at it. What he really felt was that it was not there at all, because he knew that one day, sooner or later (and more likely sooner), it would not be there. And it was the same with all objects, all people. The city was, in a rough sense, a symbol; that was easy to see. It represented everything in the world that was subject to change or, more precisely, to extinction. Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved in existence. He was plagued by the suspicion that some day he would discover he always had been wrong; until then he would have no choice but to continue as he was. A man cannot fashion his beliefs according to his fancy.
When he had finished four letters he shaved, dressed, and went out the back way into the courtyard. There was no one there; even the tall Riffian huissier who watched the cars was not in sight, perhaps because there were no cars at the moment to watch. On the other side of the gate in the street, life went on as usual. The proprietor of the antique shop that operated exclusively for guests of the hotel bowed low when he saw Stenham. For the first three or four years he had persisted with tenacity in the belief that this tourist could be persuaded to buy something; many times he had lured him into the shop and offered him tea, cigarettes and pipes of kif, all of which Stenham had accepted with the warning that he was there solely as a friend, not as a customer. This had not hindered the man from going to the trouble of unfolding Berber rugs to spread across the floor, calling his sons and bidding them act as models to show off the ancient brocaded kaftans in front of the Nazarene gentleman, or opening the studded chests covered with purple and magenta velvet to bring out daggers and swords and powder horns and snuff boxes and chapelets and fibulae and a hundred other obsolete items in which Stenham had absolutely no interest.
Now, after all this time, the man had finished by being a little in awe of this inexplicable foreigner who had withstood so many onslaughts without once succumbing; the two were on the politest of terms. Nevertheless, Stenham did not like the man’s unctuousness, and he knew him to be an unofficial informer for the French. That was almost inevitable, of course, and was not the man’s fault. Any native who came in regular contact with tourists was obliged to tender reports to the police on their activities and conversation (although it was hard to understand what importance such superficial information could have for those who kept the records of the Deuxième Bureau). On several occasions the proprietor had attempted to engage Stenham in conversations that were, if carried through to their natural conclusion, obviously going to come out into the realm of politics, but Stenham, in accepted Moroccan fashion, had gently led them in other directions and left them dangling in mid-air, impaled on the hooks of Moulana and Mektoub, from which no man could decently remove them.
“I hope the health is fine this beautiful day,” said the man, in French, as Stenham came near. Even his insistence on using the despised language annoyed Stenham; he liked Moroccans to speak to him in their own tongue. Then, without changing his facial expression or the debonair inflection of his voice, he added: “Un mot, monsieur.”
“What?” said Stenham, startled.
“Don’t wander today.” The man smiled vacuously. “Ah, oui,” he went on, as if in answer to a remark by Stenham. “Ah, oui, il fait très beau. The sun is a little warm, of course, but that’s normal. It’s the summer now. Better to stay in the hotel. And Monsieur Alain? Is he well? Give him my salutations, please. I have some very fine Roman coins now, a perfect merchandise for a great connoisseur comme Monsieur Alain. Tell him, please. You see, the front of my shop is closed. I am about to go inside and lock the door. Bon jour, monsieur! Au plaisir!”
He bowed again and stepped into his shop. Stenham stood quite still for a moment, fascinated by this unexpected performance. The entire front of the store was indeed boarded up, with heavy iron bars running diagonally in both directions across the shutters. He had not noticed it until now. And the man did, even as he watched, close the door, lock it, and noisily slide its three bolts, one after the other.
He walked on to the outer gate and stood there in the midst of hurrying porters, peering up and down the winding road. For once there were no policemen visible, and so he continued along the open space between the city walls and the cemetery where the native buses stood, looking, out of curiosity, for the command-car. It was not there. He began to suspect that there might be some truth in Rhaissa’s tale, that the police had been ordered to potential trouble spots down in the city. But here the work of loading and unloading the buses and trucks was going on as always, and there was no intimation that the day had anything unusual about it. Bored and hot, he strolled back to the hotel, met the receptionist on the main terrace.
“It’s hot today,” he said.
The tall man glanced up at the sky. “I think we may have thunder showers later this afternoon.” In his striped trousers and cutaway jacket he looked like a distinguished undertaker.
“Tell me,” said Stenham, “there are no other guests in the hotel now, besides the two English gentlemen and me, are there?”
The man looked startled, hesitated. “We are expecting others this evening. Why? If you wish to change your room, there is a choice, yes.”
Stenham laughed. “No. I’m delighted with my room, and also delighted to have the hotel empty. Not for your sake, of course,” he added. “But it’s more agreeable this way.”
The receptionist smiled thinly. “A question of taste, bien entendu”
“All your European help sleep here in the hotel, don’t they?”
Now the man permitted himself to draw his head back slightly and stare into Stenham’s face. “I think I know what is in your mind, Monsieur Stenham. But allow me to reassure you. There is nothing to fear. Our native help is completely reliable.” (Stenham smiled to himself: the man had come out to Morocco for the first time four months ago and was already speaking like a colon.) “Most of them, as you know, go home at night. The few who are stationed here have long records of loyal service, and with the exception of the watchman, all are locked into their rooms by the major domo, who keeps the keys on his person.”
To Stenham this was both ludicrous and shocking. He said: “Really? I didn’t know.”
“Besides,” pursued the other, thinking he had made his point, “there is absolutely no cause for anxiety here in Fez.”
“Oh, I realize that,” said Stenham. “But this has been a bad season for you, even so.”
“The hotel is losing some fifty thousand francs a day, monsieur,” the man announced gravely. “The season will show an enormous deficit, naturally. We keep the quantity of our food purchases down to the minimum, but I believe you will have noticed no lowering of the quality?”
“Oh, no, no,” Stenham assured him. “The food is always excellent.” This was not true, and they both knew it; at their best the meals were only adequate.
Suddenly Moss appeared on the stairs coming up from the lower garden. He was swinging a cane. The receptionist greeted him, excused himself, and disappeared.
They sat down at a table in the shade. The little Algerian came rushing over. Moss ordered a Saint Raphael. “I say, John, have you heard the latest? It’s too fantastic.”
“I’ve heard two or three fantastic things today so far. What’s yours?”
“It all has to do with a wild man the Istiqlal had been coaching to excite the mob—one of those poor demented things in rags who go about waving their arms, you know? The police fell directly into the trap.” He proceeded to tell what was substantially Rhaissa’s story, but with the added element of premeditated provocation on the part of the Nationalists. “It’s not very sporting of them, to sacrifice the poor old fool so cold-bloodedly, I must say. In any case, Hugh went dashing off in the car to investigate, and was promptly arrested. He telephoned a while ago, in a complete rage, because they won’t let him go until he produces his passport, which means that I’ve got to take it in to him. It’s rather curious how he manages always to botch things, isn’t it? All so unnecessary.”
“But why are you sitting here calmly having a drink, if he’s waiting?”
“Oh, I’ve ordered a cab,” Moss said wearily. “It’ll be here in a moment. But I really can’t take it too seriously, or feel too sorry for Hugh, you know, because he’s an idiot. His whole attitude is that of a boy at a cricket match. And of course it’s not a cricket match, is it? One doesn’t sit back and cheer when people are being killed. My feeling is that unless one can be of help in some way, one stays out of it entirely, don’t you think?”
Stenham agreed. Moss had finished his drink, wiped his mustache with a handkerchief; now he stood up. “Well, my boy, I’ll see you anon. And do stay here in the hotel. They may arrest me too, who knows, and I’ll need you to get me out. Of course the blasted Consul has gone off somewhere for the day. I think it’s deliberate on his part. Be on the lookout for a telephone call.”
CHAPTER 20
When he got to his room, slightly out of breath, for the day was not only hot but unaccountably sultry and oppressive, his door was open and Rhaissa was scrubbing the floor. She had taken up the rugs and hung them over the balconies in the windows. The room smelled of the creosote solution in her pail. Pillows and bedclothes were piled on the chairs; his presence in the room at the moment was clearly redundant. However, he stepped inside and said to her: “Any more news?” She looked up, startled, and motioned for him to close the door behind him, which he did. Then, standing up and rolling her eyes in a way meant to imply conspiracy, she said: “There’s not going to be any feast.”
“Feast? What feast?” He had quite forgotten the advent of the Aid el Kebir.
“Why, the Feast of the Sheep, the great feast! We’ve had our sheep on the roof for three weeks. Now he is very fat. But they will kill anyone who makes the sacrifice.”
“Who will? What are you talking about?” He was in an unpleasant humor, he realized now, but he felt that it was partly her fault. Besides that, he wanted to sit down, and there was no place.
“The Moslems. The friends of freedom. They say anyone who sacrifices his sheep is a traitor to the Sultan.”
One more step toward death, he thought bitterly. Whether the rumor were true or not, the fact that they were saying such things, that such an inconceivable heresy should even occur to them, was indicative of the direction in which they were moving.
“B’sah?” He said harshly. “Really? And I suppose everyone is going to listen to them and obey them? Politics is more important than religion? Allal al Fassi is greater than Allah? Why don’t they call him Allah el Fassi and have done with it?” The pun seemed rather good to him.
She could not follow his reasoning; she understood only enough of what he had said to be profoundly shocked. “No one is greater than Allah,” she replied gravely, considering what punishment was going to be meted out by God to this ignorant Nazarene for his outrageous utterances.
“Are you going to sacrifice your sheep or not?” he demanded.
She shook her head slowly from side to side, keeping her eyes on his. “Mamelouah,” she said. “It’s forbidden.”
He was exasperated with her. “It’s not forbidden!” he shouted. “On the contrary, it’s forbidden not to! Allah demands it. Has there ever been a year when there was no sacrifice?”
She continued to shake her head. “Last year,” she said, “there was no feast.”
“Of course there was! Didn’t Abdelmjid kill a sheep last year?”
“His father killed it. We were not married until afterward, just before Mouloud.”
“But he did kill it.”
“Oh, yes. But it was wasted, because the Sultan was taken away that very day.”
“Ah,” said Stenham thoughtfully. “I see. Of course,” The French had chosen the holiest day of the year to whisk the Sultan away, and it had been the false Sultan who had performed the sacrifice. Therefore there had been no sacrifice. He was silent a moment. Presently he asked her: “Why can’t you sacrifice your sheep in the name of the true Sultan?”
“The Istiqlal doesn’t want any feast,” she said patiently. “It’s a sin to make a feast when everyone is unhappy.”
“You mean the people might forget they were unhappy if they had their feast, and that’s what the Istiqlal doesn’t want. It wants them to remember they’re unhappy. Isn’t that it?”
“Yes,” she said, a little uncertainly.
“But can’t you see?” he cried, shouting in spite of himself, aware that she couldn’t see at all, never would see. “Can’t you see that they’re trying to take your religion away from you so they can have all the power? They want to close the mosques forever and make slaves out of all the Moslems. Slaves!”
“My mother was a slave in the Pacha’s house,” said Rhaissa in a matter-of-fact tone. “She used to have chicken every day, and she had four bracelets of heavy gold and a silk kaftan.”
As people have a way of doing when they know they are lost. Stenham resorted to sarcasm. “And I suppose she loved being a slave,” he said.
“It was written.” Rhaissa shrugged.
“Yes. Of course,” he said, wondering how he had happened once again to allow himself to fall into the error of engaging in an argument with one of these people, since it was manifestly impossible to keep control of any discussion, and since the discussion’s inevitable failure to remain on t
he road of logic always gave him a depressing sense of his own futility. After all, if they were rational beings, he thought, the country would have no interest; its charm was a direct result of the people’s lack of mental development. However, one could scarcely hope for them to be consciously and militantly backward. Once they had got hold of even the smallest fragment of the trappings of European culture they clung to it with an absurd desperation, but they were able to make it their own solely to the extent that the fragment was isolated from its context, and therefore meaningless. But after so many centuries in the deep-freeze of isolation, it was to be expected that, having been brought out of it, the culture should now undergo a very rapid decomposition. “It was written,” she had told him, and he had agreed with her; that was the final and all-embracing truth about Morocco—about the world, for that matter. Discussion was nothing more than the clash of personalities.