She told him about her trip to Foum el Kheneg—the difficulties of getting there, the unbelievable heat, the desolation of the landscape, the delightful home that Captain Hamelle and his wife had made for themselves in the hostile wilderness, and the trips they had taken in a jeep through the mountains to the Berber casbahs roundabout.
“I’ve never been in that particular valley,” he said, “but I’ve been in country like it. It’s magnificent.”
“Magnificent country,” she agreed, “but a pretty terrifying civilization, completely feudal. Those caïds have the power of life and death over their subjects, you know. Think of the gap those people have got to get across before they can hope to be anything.”
He felt the anger rising to his lips; fighting it back, he said: “I don’t think I know what you mean. What would you like them to be, other than what they are, which is perfectly happy?”
She looked at him carefully, as if she were measuring his intelligence. “Will you please tell me what makes you think those helpless serfs are happy? Or haven’t you ever given it a thought? Are they just happy by definition because they’re absolutely isolated from the world? They’re slaves, living in ignorance and superstition and sickness and filth, and you can sit there and calmly tell me they’re happy! Don’t you think that’s going a little far?”
“It’s not going nearly as far as you. I say leave them alone. You say they’ve got to change, they’ve got to be something.” He was excited; this was what had been standing between them. Perhaps they could get to it this time.
She tossed her head in a gesture of impatience. “They’ll change,” she said, with the air of a person who has access to private sources of information.
“You and the Istiqlal,” he murmured.
“Look, Mr. Stenham. I don’t think we know each other well enough to get into an argument. Do you?”
He was silent; the Mister Stenham had indicated the distance between them which doubtless had been there all along, only he had not been conscious of it. She was infinitely less approachable than he had thought; indeed, at the moment it was difficult to imagine what it would be like to be on intimate terms with her. He looked away from the table: the two rows of waiters, Moroccan and European, stood against their respective walls watching them discreetly.
“Smile,” he told her.
She hesitated, drew back her upper lip in a tentative momentary grimace that was a sketch of a smile.
“Your teeth are too sharp,” he said. “When I was a kid I once had a baby fox. It had fluffy fur and a big bushy tail and everyone who saw it used to make a dash for it and try to pet it. You can imagine the rest.”
Now she smiled. “As far as I know, Mr. Stenham, I haven’t got either a big bushy tail or fluffy fur.”
“Don’t you think it might help our struggling friendship if you called me John, instead of Mister Stenham?”
“It might,” she admitted. “I’ll try to remember. I’ll also try to remember that you’re a hopeless romantic without a shred of confidence in the human race.” She was staring at him fixedly, and he resented the deep sensation of uneasiness her expression was able to awaken in him.
“You’re a bright girl,” he said with irony.
“You remind me so much of a friend of mine,” she went on, still watching him. “A nice enough boy, but all tied up in knots by his own theories about life. You even look a little like him, I swear! He wrote pretty good poetry, too. At least, it seemed all right until you took time off and suddenly asked yourself what it meant.”
“I’m not a poet.” His voice was sour, but he smiled at her.
She continued, impervious. “And I’ll bet your life histories have a lot in common. Did you ever join the Communist Party? He did; he used to put on a special outfit and go and stand on corners and sell the Daily Worker. Later he went in for Yoga, and the last I knew he’d become a Roman Catholic. That didn’t stop him, though, from getting to be an alcoholic.”
Stenham, whose face had briefly shown traces of alarm, now smiled. “Well,” he said, “I think you’ve drawn a pretty complete picture of somebody who’s about as different from me as he could get.”
“I don’t believe it,” she announced in a firm voice. “I can feel the similarity. Intuition,” she added, as if to keep him from saying it with sarcasm.
“Have it your own way. Maybe I am like him. Maybe the first thing I know I’ll be standing on my head or going to Mass or joining Alcoholics Anonymous, or all of them at once. Who knows?”
“And another thing,” she pursued. “Now that I think of it—of course!—it was after he left the Party that he began to have delusions. He suspected everybody else of belonging to it. You had to be practically a Swami for him not to challenge whatever you said. He smelled propaganda everywhere.”
“I see,” Stenham said.
“You may be unconscious of it, but twice since we’ve been sitting here you’ve practically accused me. You think back a minute.”
He sat quietly until the waiter had left the table. Then he leaned forward, speaking intensely. “But, Lee, I don’t make any bones of the fact. Of course I was in the Party. Exactly sixteen years ago. And I stayed in, officially, exactly twenty months and attended exactly twenty-four meetings and so what? I wasn’t even in the United States most of the time—”
She was laughing. “But you don’t have to defend yourself! I don’t care how long you were in the Party or why you joined or what you did in it. I’m just delighted to see I was right, that’s all.”
“Do you want coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“I think we’d better go, don’t you? The mud’ll be pretty well dried by now.”
“Just a minute,” she said with mock sternness. “You did accuse me, didn’t you?”
“All right, I did. But you brought it on yourself with your remarks.”
“I think you’re crazy.”
“No, I mean it.”
“Let’s go,” she said, rising.
The head waiter bowed them out and closed the door after them. Stenham walked behind her along the damp corridor with its straw-paneled walls, thinking that the conversation had been completely unsatisfactory. What he had wanted to say was: You brought it on yourself with your half-baked, pseudo-democratic idealism. But he knew she would not accept criticism from him; she was an American woman, and an American woman always knew best. She assumed the role of a patient and amused mother, and with gentle ridicule reduced you to the status of a small boy. But if you spoke up in your own defense, which necessarily meant attacking the falseness of her position, she swiftly invoked the unwritten laws of chivalry. Too, he envied Lee for being able to speak in so jaunty and offhand a manner of a thing about which he felt such a profound, if irrational, guilt.
The mud had been dried into an inoffensive paste that crumbled underfoot, the sky was clear, and the glare that had accompanied the rising of the mist had been dissipated. For Stenham the act of stepping out into the street constituted an automatic leaving behind of rancor; he observed this and rejoiced, for it would have been an ordeal to wander through the town carrying the weight of his bad humor. As they followed the zigzagging street between the walls, he wondered whether coming out here had performed the same catharsis for her, or whether she even needed such a thing, seeing that she could not very well consider herself in any light save that of victor in the recent verbal bout. Apparently she had nothing at all on her mind save the things she was seeing around her. Every little while she hummed a tune to herself as she carefully picked her way around the places that might still be slippery. He listened: it was On the Sunny Side of the Street, phrased arbitrarily, according to her breathing.
They came to the pigeon market below the old mosque at Bab el Guissa. There was certainly something abnormal about the day, but he could not discover what it was that made him think so. Work was going on as always in the quarter, which was devoted largely to oil presses and carpenters’ workshops. There were th
e usual numbers of donkeys being driven and ridden back and forth, of small children bearing trays of unbaked and baked bread on their heads going to and from the ovens, of girls and old women carrying vessels of water from the public fountains. At the same time there was a definite if subtle difference between today and other days, one which he was convinced was not imaginary, and yet he could not tell where the difference lay. Could it be in the expressions on the faces? He decided not; they were inscrutable as always.
They got to the blind passageway just beyond the Lemtiyine school, a long narrow alley leading downward to an arched door whose gate was always open. Split banana-leaves waved across the top of the wall like the battered paper decorations of a festival long past. Suddenly he knew what was amiss; seeing this empty corridor had told him.
“Ah!” he said with satisfaction.
“What is it?”
“I’d been thinking that there was something strange about the place today, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Now I know what it is. All the boys and young men are missing. We haven’t seen a boy over twelve or a man under thirty since we left the hotel.”
“Is that bad?” she asked.
“Well, it’s been known to be bad, all right. The crazy French think if they can get that age group behind bars they automatically remove most of the sources of trouble. But probably today it’s a case of something big going on down in the town, and they’re all there to see it. What’s going on is anybody’s guess.”
“I don’t want to get into any crowds,” she declared. “It’s all right with me where we go and what we do, as long as we steer clear of the mob. I have a thing about getting caught in a crowd. I don’t think there’s anything more terrifying.”
They walked more slowly. “I’m inclined to agree with you,” he said. Suddenly he stopped. “I’ll tell you what. If you don’t mind walking a little more, it might be the better part of valor to go back and out Bab el Guissa, and do the whole thing outside the walls. That way we’re sure of avoiding getting hemmed in down in the Talâa. We’ll get to Bou Jeloud a little later, that’s all.”
She looked at him as if she were wondering why he had not suggested this in the beginning, but all she said was: “Fine.”
For ten minutes or so they retraced their steps, until they came to the mosque. The massive arch of Bab el Guissa was behind, a short distance up the hill, a small fortress in itself, the interior of which had been rebuilt by the French to house a police office. They went through the first gate into the cool darkness. The passage made a turn to the left, then to the right, and they saw the trees and hills ahead. As they walked through the outer arch, two French policemen standing along the wall conferred briefly, and then one of them called out.
“Where are you going, monsieur?”
Stenham said they were taking a walk.
“You are from the Mérinides Palace?”
Stenham said they were.
“When you go back into the Medina to return to your hotel, you will use the other gate, not this one,” the policeman told him.
Stenham said they would.
“And when you have finished your walk, you will take no more walks until you are told. They should have warned you at the hotel. There are disorders in the native quarter.”
Stenham thanked him and they walked on.
“We’ll have to go a little out of our way now,” he told her presently, “or they’ll see we’re turning in the wrong direction and call us back.”
They walked straight ahead toward the hills until they came to the main road. Then they stopped and looked back. Behind them stretched the blank face of the ramparts, broken only by the single arch of Bab el Guissa. The two policemen were still visible, tiny blue spots against the darkness of its opening.
When the road curved, they set off across the cemetery, cutting back toward a path that ran more or less parallel to the ramparts, but along extremely uneven terrain. First they were at a level with the top of the ramparts, and could see the further side of the Medina, then they were in a deep hollow where the path wound between rows of cactus and aloes, with nothing beyond but the steep dust-colored slopes rising on both sides toward the sky. Then the land dropped away, and the narrow lane which had been at the bottom of a ravine followed the spine of a twisting hill. Goats wandered and cropped the dwarf thistles under the olive trees on the hillside below. They skirted the bases of perpendicular cliffs, where dogs barked to protect the caves that men had dug with their hands out of the clay, and where babies now squalled and occasionally a drum was being beaten. Then they were in a dried-up meadow where the earth was veined with wide dark cracks.
“Whew! It’s like walking inside an oven,” she said.
“We’ll take a cab back.”
“If we ever get there. How much further is it?”
“Not far. But you’re going to have to hold your nose pretty soon. I warn you.”
From the top of an absurd little crest of land across which the path led them, they could see over the ramparts into the Casbah en Nouar near by; its roofs and gardens hid the center of the Medina. They stood still a moment and looked at the panorama of strange formations around them. The earth’s configurations here were like those of an unruly head of hair. The land whirled up into senseless peaks and dropped off vertically into mysterious pits and hollows.
“Listen,” Stenham told her. Like the shrilling of insects came the distant sound of prolonged shouting from many throats. “There’s whatever’s going on,” he said.
“Well, thank heavens we turned around. I wouldn’t be down in there for anything in the world.”
The stench began before the village came into view. Then they passed the first dwellings, made with packing cases, thorn bushes and oil cans, tied together with rope and strips of rags. A more intense squalor would have been inconceivable. Children, naked or with mud-colored pieces of cloth hanging to them, played on the refuse-strewn waste land between the huts, where the ground glittered with tin and broken glass.
“This is all new,” he told her. “None of this existed a few years ago.”
“God,” she said with feeling.
The mud had not dried here; they were obliged to walk at the sides of the path. The ground crawled with countless flies; at each step a small swarm rose a few inches into the air, only to settle again immediately. As they passed through the village the people stared at them, but with no expression beyond that of mild curiosity. The way now led up a steep hill toward the ramparts. Tons of garbage and refuse had been dumped at the top and, sliding down the long slope, threatened now to engulf the improvised dwellings below; along the side of this encroaching mountain half-starved dogs wandered like hopeless ghosts, feebly nosing the objects, occasionally dislodging a tin can which rolled a bit further down. There were people here, too, carefully examining the waste, and from time to time putting something into the sacks they carried slung over their shoulders.
When they reached the top of the hill, panting, they did not stop and turn to see the village behind them, but continued to walk until the stink had been left behind and they had gone through Bab Mahrouk’s two portals. Then, beyond the shadow of the ramparts, in the wicker market, they stood still a moment to catch their breath.
“I’m going to say something that’s almost worthy of a John Stenham,” she told him. “And that is, that I wish you hadn’t taken me through there. It somehow spoils the rest of the place for me.”
“That’s about one twentieth of what there is outside the walls,” he said. “Don’t you take slums for granted, yet? Have you ever seen a city that didn’t have them?”
“Oh, but not that kind! Not quite that hopeless. My God, no!”
“I should think you’d be glad to have seen it. It’s one more thing to be changed.”
Ignoring his sarcasm, “That much it certainly is,” she said grimly.
He pointed back at Bab Mahrouk’s wide arch. “One reform they’ve made recently,” he went on in the same mock-
innocent fashion, “is that now there are no heads decorating that beautiful gate. They used to have a row of them on pikes for people to admire as they went out. Enemies of the Pacha and other evildoers. Not in the Middle Ages, I mean, but in the twentieth century, just a few years ago. Don’t you think it’s an improvement without them?”
“Yes,” she said with exasperation. “It’s an improvement without them.”
It was a pleasure to walk in the shade of the plane trees along the avenue that led back toward Bou Jeloud. When they got to the square where the buses waited, policemen were lined up in front of the gaudy blue gate; it looked like a scene in a lavish musical comedy. They waited at the far end of the open space, studying the array of men in uniform. Framed by the arch of Bab Bou Jeloud among the squat mud buildings was a low minaret with a huge mass of straw atop it, and in the middle of the straw stood a stork with one leg raised and bent against its body; it looked very white in the strong sunlight.
“I think this is the end of our excursion,” he said to her. “If we go through the gate we’ll be in the Medina, and we don’t want that. And anyway, it doesn’t look to me as though they’d let us through. There’s a nice little café here. Are you game for a mint tea?”
“I’m game for anything as long as I can sit myself down,” she said. “Just to sit would be a terrific luxury at this point. But let’s make it inside, out of the glare.”
CHAPTER 23
There were four cafés on the square, and each one had a large space in front of it which was ordinarily full of tables and chairs. Today, these had prudently not been set out, so that the sides of the square presented a deserted aspect which was emphasized by the fact that the center also was empty, for no one was walking in it. True, it was hot, and there would have been few strollers at this hour in any case, but the absence of people was so complete that the scene—even if the line of police could have been disregarded—had no element of the casualness which ordinarily gave the place its character.