The women in the tents were cooking the evening tajine; the smell of the hot olive oil mingled with the wood smoke. She kept on climbing, telling herself that she should have expected all this to happen, that it was her own fault for having come, since she had known from the start that he was a selfish clod. Her initial reaction had been the correct one. “I won’t go,” she had said, and then her anger with the French had blunted the edge of her common sense.
Up here the tents were sparsely strewn among the trees, and ahead there was only the empty countryside. The sound of the drums still came up from below, but it was mixed with the hissing of the olive leaves in the rising wind. Some distance away a native dog barked; the high sound was like the hysterical laughter of a woman. When she had gone beyond the last tent and its light was no longer visible, she stopped, a little sobered by the solitude, and stood leaning against a low-swung bough. The wind’s force increased by the minute. She was out of breath, and she would have liked to sit down, but memories of scorpion and snake stories she had heard kept her standing, and she remained as she was, breathing hard of the pure air that came rushing across the hillside toward her. It was a strange wind, she decided; it blew as if it were determined not to allow itself to abate for a single second. It was not like a wind at all, but like the breeze from a monstrous stationary fan, or like a huge draught steadily increasing in force. The noise it made in the trees was like the ocean now, or like the sound of an approaching storm. Instinctively she looked up into the sky: the calm, coldly burning moon stood above, and no cloud existed. But that was what it was; the noise like the sea out there on the mountain was a windstorm that had not yet arrived, a crazy nocturnal gale on its way. She listened for a trace of the festivities behind her and could hear none. Still, she knew she had only to go over the hummock beyond that fat-trunked tree to see the flickering pink walls of the last tent.
When the full force of the wind struck, she flung out her arms and let it push her against the tree, and she breathed deeply of it until she was giddy and would have had to sit down had she not been pinioned there by it. It had an amazing smell, like the smell of life itself, she thought; but after a moment it reminded her of sun-baked rocks and secret places in the forest. Then it grew very strong indeed, and she decided she would have to go back. A few more breaths, she said, filling her lungs completely with it, breathing out, and in.
Her head swam. Cataracts of wind rushed down the polished channels they had gouged across the sky, spilling out against the mountainside. Dust and dry bits of plants dancing upward in spirals smote her face. Carefully she sat down on the ground and leaned against the tree. Now she felt momentarily ill, but much happier. The wind roared; something touched her shoulder. She looked up, catching her breath, frightened for one instant, relieved for the next, and vexed immediately afterward. It was Stenham, standing over her, saying nothing, about to crouch down beside her. She made a great effort and got to her feet.
“Hello,” she said, feeling like a guilty child, but only because he would not say anything. Now he did speak. “What’s the idea?” His voice was angry.
“What idea?” she asked, and spat out the dust that had blown into her mouth.
He seized her arm. “Come on,” he said, trying to pull her along.
“Stop. Wait.” She was not ready to leave the hilltop.
“How’d you get way up here?”
“I walked. Would you mind letting go of me?”
“Not at all. That’s quite all right with me.”
“Do you have to be insulting, too?”
“What’s the matter with you?” He took her arm again, impatiently.
“Please. I can walk perfectly well. Let go of me!”
“Oh, well, God damn it, fall down, then, if that’s what you want.”
It was like a command: she stumbled against a rock, tried to go on, and sank to the ground. He stooped, was beside her, trying to comfort her, being ineffectual, saying: “Where does it hurt?” and “I’m terribly sorry” and “I feel as though it were my fault,” at which she made a silent gesture of denial, although he probably did not interpret it as such. “Do you think you can walk?” he inquired. She said nothing; all she wanted to do was push against the pain. If she relaxed the pressure an instant she would burst into tears, and that could not happen, must not happen. But after he had grown used to her muteness, sitting back helplessly to watch her, he came nearer again and put his arm around her, caressed her shoulder tentatively. It was not what she wanted. She shivered, and moaned inaudibly once. Then he tried to draw her to him, both of them squatting there in that ludicrous position.
At all costs this must be stopped, she told herself, even at the risk of having him see her weep, which she felt would certainly happen if she moved or spoke. And anyway, she thought, as she felt his hands moving softly along her flesh (as if she were a tree and they were the tendrils of a creeping parasitic plant), what sort of man was it who would take such a blatantly unfair advantage? With this pain how could she be expected to defend herself against his unjust tactics? The tears began to flow; it had required only that last reflection to loose them. She sobbed, and with all her might tore his hands away.
She was free, but now she was in the grip of her tears, and the shame of having him see her this way, even in the moonlight and with the vast wind sweeping by, increased them. Hatred for him welled up within her; if she had had the strength she would have hurled herself upon him and tried to kill him. But she did not move, doubled up there on the earth, pressing and rubbing her ankle as she wept. “What a fool you are! What a fool you are!” she heard her own voice repeating inside her head, and she did not know whether she was saying that to him or to herself. He had risen, and remained aloof now, looking down at her. After a long time, she slowly got to her feet, and with his help (it made no difference, now that she hated him) limped painfully all the way back down to the café.
And then she sat there in the smoke and dimness, with the hubbub of voices and music around her, and began to live the next hours of her own bland hell. Stenham sat near by, breaking his silence only now and then to say a few words to the two boys, both of whom looked exceedingly glum and sullen. Once she found herself thinking: Thank God nothing happened up there, and was furious that she should have such a thought; there had been no question of it. But she could not look at Stenham. She passed the time massaging her ankle and smoking furiously, not planning the details of her vengeance, but reinforcing her determination to have it, one way or another. About midnight, when the pain had subsided somewhat and she was beginning to feel exhausted and a little sleepy, perhaps because of the pall of kif smoke that lay in the tent, he turned and said to her: “The wind has died down.” She did not answer for a moment; then she said: “Yes.” That was all. Then he began to talk seriously and at great length in Arabic with the boys. Once again, a good deal later, he spoke to her, his voice enthusiastic, almost tremulous, as if he had for the moment completely forgotten that a state of hostility existed between them. “This boy sees an untainted world,” he exclaimed. “Do you realize that?” Her mumbled reply apparently was inaudible to him. “What’d you say?” he asked.
“I said I couldn’t say,” she replied, raising her voice. She did not know whether the world that Amar saw was still in a pristine state or far advanced in decay; she suspected it was the latter, but in either case, the speculation was one of distinctly minor interest to her at the moment. Her mind was occupied with thoughts of herself and her mistreatment; because she felt she had been humiliated, she also believed that Stenham must be triumphant, must imagine he had gained some perverse sort of victory over her. For the time being she saw her whole Moroccan adventure as a ghastly fiasco, and she herself as having failed in some mysterious but profound manner.
In the first place, she argued, getting back to inessentials, which were the only things she could manipulate in her present state, her first meeting with him should have persuaded her that he was not a man she co
uld ever want to know, for he was not physically attractive to her. Of that she had been aware in a flash. She could tell immediately what was for her and what was not, and Stenham had straightway fallen into the latter category: he had failed the test. (The test consisted of imagining a man lying in bed asleep in the morning; if the thought of his inert form sprawled out there among the sheets in their disorder could be entertained without revulsion, then she knew there was a possibility, otherwise he simply was not for her.) The test had always worked, and she had always sidestepped getting to know too well those who had failed to pass it, precisely in order to avoid just such circumstances as these. But her weakness and carelessness this time by no means excused a jot of his behavior, nor, when the moment of reckoning came, would she even consider her own shortcomings.
She dozed, awoke, dropped off again, returned to hear always the same eternal conversation: Stenham, Amar and the other boy, whose voice came in only now and then, like a compère, with the chorus of tea-drinkers and kif-smokers in the background. Tomorrow would be unbearable from all points of view; she contemplated its confusion and endlessness with dread. But she would escape in the first bus or truck that moved out of Sidi Bou Chta, even if it meant spending a day, two days, in the filthy little room at the Hôtel des Ambassades.
Again, a long time afterward, she awoke to find all three of them gone. “So much the better,” she thought grimly. The chaos of drums and shouting still went on, with added vigor, if anything, and guns were being fired into the sky at short intervals. In an hour or two it would be light; the dawn of the Aid el Kebir would have broken, and the already sharpened knife-blades would be thoughtfully thumbed once again in anticipation of the mid-morning hour of sacrifice.
CHAPTER 28
They sprawled on the matting, Stenham, Amar and Mohammed, involved in a discussion which had been going on for at least two hours. As far as Stenham was concerned, its subject was religion, and Amar seemed content to let it remain on that plane. Mohammed, however, felt constantly impelled to give it a political direction; indeed, one would have said he was incapable of keeping the two things separate. Religion to him was a purely social institution, and the details of its practice were a matter of governmental interest. Stenham was irked by the boy’s thick-headedness; he wondered why Amar had wanted to bring him along.
Most of the men who were not asleep had by now gone out to pray and to be present when the dawn came. A few still engaged in aimless conversation; the rest slept. Lying on this ground, thought Stenham, was like being astride a starved horse: no matter what position he took, he could not make himself comfortable. There seemed to be rocks everywhere under the smooth mat. Lee at last lay unmoving. For a long time she had been in a half-sleep, turning repeatedly from one side to the other. The two boys had been upset when she had come limping in, leaning on Stenham’s arm, but she had looked at them with such animosity that their expressions of sympathy had died on their lips. As the time had passed and she had refused to address even a word to any of them, Amar had remarked to Stenham that the lady was unhappy. “Of course. She’s in pain,” Stenham told him. “No, I mean she’s always unhappy. She’s always going to be unhappy in her head, that lady.” “Why?” Stenham had asked, amused. “Do you know why?” “Of course I know why,” Amar had replied confidently. “It’s because she doesn’t know anything about the world.”
This had seemed a pointless enough reply, and Stenham had let the subject drop. But during this long discussion, which had provided him with his first true opportunity for going even a little below the top of Amar’s mind, he had been struck again and again by the boy’s unerring judgment in separating primary factors from subsidiary ones. It was a faculty which had nothing to do with mental alertness, but derived its strength rather from an unusually powerful and smoothly functioning set of moral convictions. To have come upon this natural wisdom in an adult would have been extraordinary enough, but in an individual who was little more than a child, and illiterate as well, it was incredible. He sat watching the changes of expression on Amar’s countenance as he spoke, and began to feel a little like the prospector for gold who in spite of his own prolonged lack of hope suddenly finds himself face to face with the first nugget. And he marveled at the mysterious way in which the pieces of the world were tied together, that it should have been a purely sentimental detail like a dragonfly struggling in a pool of water, a thing exterior to any conceivable interpretation of Moslem dogma, which had made it possible for him to suspect, even unconsciously, the presence of hidden riches.
When a silence arrived, he said to Amar: “So the lady knows nothing about the world? What makes you think that?”
“Hada echouf. You can see she wants to be something powerful in the world. She thinks she can, but that’s because she’s never surrendered.”
“Surrendered? What do you mean?”
“Of course. What is the first duty of everyone in the world? To surrender. Al Islam! Al Islam!” He thrust his arms forward (the mud of the Medina was still on his sleeves from his encounter with the police) and bent his head downward in the beginning of a gesture of prostration. Then, continuing, he sketched a series of imaginary instances where the persons involved had or had not submitted to divine authority. In each illustration the accursed person—that is, the unhappy one—saw himself as a being of importance, whereas the blessed and joyous ones had understood that they were nothing at all, that whatever strength they were able to wield existed only in direct proportion to the degree of their obedience to the inexorable laws of Allah.
To be happy, cease striving and admit you are powerless. Islam, the religion of surrender. It had never occurred to Stenham that the word “Islam” actually meant “surrender.” “I see,” he said aloud.
“Every man you see in the street thinks his life is important,” pursued Amar, warming to his subject, for his own life still seemed terribly important to him, “and he doesn’t want it to stop. But Allah has decreed that each one must lose his life. O allèche? Why? To convince men that life isn’t worth anything. No man’s life is worth anything. It’s like the wind.” He blew his breath into the air and made a single clutching motion with his outstretched hand.
“Now, wait,” said Stenham. “You say—”
But Amar would not wait. “Why are we in the world?” he demanded.
Stenham smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that.”
“You don’t know why?” asked Amar sadly. “No.”
Mohammed yawned ostentatiously. “I’ll tell you,” he volunteered. “To talk all night long, while real men are being shot.”
Stenham would have said that a shadow of pain flickered across Amar’s face, but in an instant it was gone, and he continued. “We’re in the world for only one reason, and that’s to act out what was written for us. The man whose destiny is bad, he’s lucky, because all he has to do is give thanks. But the man whose destiny is good—Ay! That’s much harder, because unless he is a very very good man he’ll begin to think he had something to do with his good luck. Don’t you understand?”
“Yes, but perhaps he did have something to do with it.” (In such arguments Stenham often found himself unexpectedly extolling the bourgeois virtues.) “If he was good himself, and worked hard—”
“Never!” cried Amar, his eyes blazing. “You’re a Nazarene, a Christian. That’s why you talk that way. If you were a Moslem and said such things, you’d be killed or struck blind here, this minute. Christians have good hearts, but they don’t know anything. They think they can change what has been written. They’re afraid to die because they don’t understand what death is for. And if you’re afraid to die, then you don’t know what life is for. How can you live?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” Stenham droned amiably. “And I don’t think I ever will know.”
“And the day you do know you’ll come to me and tell me you want to be a Moslem, and we shall all have a great festival for you, because a Nazarene who has
become a Moslem is worth more to Allah than a Moslem who was always a Moslem.”
Stenham sighed. “Thank you,” he said. He always thanked them when this point had been reached, for it was a proof of friendship when someone broached the subject of conversion. “I hope some day all that may happen.”
“Incha’Allahr.”
“Let’s go out and watch the dancing,” suggested Stenham, who suddenly felt like cutting the conversation short. It would be a good way, since the noise of the drums and chanting was so loud that talking became an impossibility once one had pushed one’s way into a circle. The two boys jumped up and slipped into their sandals. Stenham rose, stretched, and glancing quickly at Lee to be sure she was still asleep, took his shoes in his hand and tiptoed over to the opening in the tent. “Nimchi o nji, I’ll be back,” he told the qaouaji.
It was the coldest hour of the night. The moon had gone behind the mountain that lay to the west, but a part of the sky there was still bright, and the more distant parts of the countryside continued to bathe in its radiance. The two boys stamped their feet and kicked up their heels in the steps of an improvised dance; this took them along the ground more quickly than Stenham could walk. When they had got ahead some distance he saw Mohammed glance swiftly back, and then put his hand on Amar’s shoulder and say a few words into his ear. He watched Amar to see his reaction, but as far as he could tell there was none. However, he did reply briefly. When they reached a more crowded crosspath they stood still and waited for Stenham to come abreast of them. He turned his face toward the eastern sky, hunting for a sign of daybreak, but it was not yet due.