“Don’t be silly,” she said gaily. “You’re just making it complicated. If you had even a grain of poetry in you, you’d understand. The boy wanted action. At his age he has to have it. This is the crucial point of his whole life. He’d never have forgiven himself later if he’d sat around moping now. Can’t you see that?”
Stenham looked at her, but not as though he were listening to her. The mask of preoccupation he wore contrasted strangely with his violence in suddenly crying: “Leave all that!” Now he turned to face her. “I’m not thinking of him. He’s gone. One little life, another little life. What’s the difference?” (She studied his face briefly, and found that she was unable to tell whether this last was irony or whether he was speaking sincerely. Now he seemed to be waiting for her to answer, but she said nothing.) “What I don’t understand is you.” He stopped, hesitated. “As a matter of fact, I do understand it. I just want to hear you say it in your own words. What did you think you were doing? What in the name of God would make you decide to do a thing like that?”
She was disappointed: where was the rage? “It’s something to make a person happy,” she began tentatively.
“Agh!” His voice was harsh. “There’s a four-letter word for that. You guess which one and tell me. It’d mean more coming from your lips. You could give it its money’s worth.”
She had been lighting a cigarette to cover her nervousness, and she had discovered that her hand was trembling. Of course, she told herself, he would show his anger in this icy, abstract fashion. She had been foolish to expect a normal, simple quarrel.
“Your venom isn’t really insulting, you know,” she told him. “It has no focus. If you want to be really nasty, at least you’ve got to be conscious of the other person.”
At this point she thought he was going to say: “I’m sorry,” but he merely looked at her.
“I believe in what I did,” she went on. “There’s no reason—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “That’s the tragic part of it. You have no sense of moral responsibility. As long as you get your vicarious thrill you’re fine. This time you had two thrills. The little one was Amar and the big one was me.”
She laughed uncomfortably. “It could be. I haven’t an analytical mind.”
He glanced toward the entrance of the tent. The light outside was fading, the drums still went on, and the café was being slowly filled by older men who talked quietly.
“What does it feel like to have the power of life or death over another human being?” he asked her suddenly. “Can you describe it?” And because he looked truly angry now for the first time, she felt her heart leap up and light a corresponding flame within her.
“It must be exhausting to see everything in terms of cheap melodrama,” she said with feigned solicitousness. “I wonder you have the vitality.”
Now he said the four-letter word he had not said a few minutes earlier, got to his feet, and stalked out of the tent. She sat on, smoking, but she did not feel calm.
Almost immediately he came back in, clearly having been debating with himself outside the entrance; his expression was determined, a little embarrassed, and he was shaking his head. He walked over to her. “God damn it,” he said, sitting down again beside her, “why do we have to act like two six-year-olds? I’m sorry if I’ve behaved badly.” He waited for her to speak.
She could feel herself growing more nervous by the second. “If you mean just now—” she began. Then she stopped; she had been going to refer to his behavior last night, but she was quiet an instant.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she heard herself saying with a vast, incomprehensible relief, as if this were solving everything.
He was looking at her with great seriousness. “After all, we got on all right with our differences of opinion before we saddled ourselves with that kid. I don’t know why we shouldn’t be able to pick up where we left off. Nothing’s changed, has it?”
“That’s true,” she said thoughtfully. But in her mind she was aware that something had changed, and because she did not know what had made this difference or in what it consisted, she postponed complete agreement with his thesis until some later time. Then she said, with a sudden vehemence which made him look at her curiously: “I don’t know. I don’t think the boy had that much to do with it. I think it’s this place that’s got us down. I know if I have to sleep here again tonight, I’ll go into a decline, that’s all. Can’t you find some way out of here?”
She had spoken without thinking, and now she expected resistance. But all he said was: “It won’t be easy. And don’t forget, we came up here so as not to be in Fez today. It’s still the big day.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” she protested. “They can come and murder me in my bed, but at least it’ll be a bed, and not a pile of rocks.” She patted the matting beside her, and glanced up quickly to catch his expression; did he understand, or was he merely disgusted with her? (“Nothing’s changed,” he had said an instant ago.) And now, when she saw his smile, she knew in a flash what had changed; she knew that even though she still thought that smile faintly fatuous, it did not repel her. With her gesture of hostility she had brought herself within his orbit. But it was not only she who had changed, for, otherwise, why was he smiling?
“We can’t do more than try,” he said, still smiling, and got up to go out.
Later, when the passage back was all arranged, and the truck would be leaving in an hour or so, and they had finished their evening meal of soup, bread, lamb and tea, they took a stroll, climbing to the top of the hill behind, to watch the panorama once again. “Back to the scene of the crime,” she thought, feeling the pressure of Stenham’s fingers on her arm as he guided her between the dim bushes, around the dark rocks, to a spot from which the valley of flame, smoke and moonlight was entirely visible. Up there they sat quietly, and when he drew her to him, implanting a kiss first on her forehead, then on each cheek, and finally (so beautifully), on her lips, she knew it was decided, and she realized with some surprise that however eagerly he might be looking forward to the intimacies of love, she herself hoped for that moment with no less impatience.
She stretched out her hand, wonderingly touched first the hard stubble on his chin, and then the smoothness of his lips, and thinking: “Why now, and not before?” pulled him to her again.
CHAPTER 30
The convoy of buses sped around the curves, each one bathing in the dust raised by the one ahead. In the first vehicle sat all the young men from the Istiqlal, who had planned with the drivers of the other buses that as part of the strategy they would stop at a certain point on the road before they arrived back at the junction of the main highway, and rearrange the seating in such a way that when they drew near to Fez there would be two or three party members in each bus. They were also not to drive into the town all together, of course, but were to time the entry of each vehicle at alternate ten-and fifteen-minute intervals. From the first moment when he had heard the terrible news, Amar had begun to tremble; they must be halfway to Fez now, and he was still trembling. An image haunted his mind: he stood just inside the door of the large room in his house, seeing his mother pinned to the floor by the point of a bayonet, but struggling to rise, while a shadowy form engaged in the deflowering of Halima on the cushions in the corner. Doubtless his father and Mustapha lay dead outside in the courtyard, which explained the fact that they did not figure in the fantasy.
Mohammed sat beside him trying to make conversation, but Amar could not hear what he was saying. Surely this was the day of reckoning, the day of vengeance—perhaps his last day on earth! The other men in the bus sat stiff and grim, without speaking, some of them with their faces covered against the dust. Suddenly there was a loud report, above the clanking and rattling. Hands went to daggers as the bus slowed and stopped, but it was a punctured tire. Everyone got out and wandered up and down the road, while the other buses went by one by one, leaving storms of white dust in the air behind them. Ordinarily the me
n in the buses passing would have called and waved with glee, because it was always amusing to see one’s friends suffer a slight misfortune, but today they scarcely looked out. Mohammed was disgusted. “The sons of whores!” he grumbled. “Suppose we need something to change the tire with. Who’s going to give it to us? Nobody! They’ve all gone by.”
Amar returned slowly from his scenes of carnage. He and Mohammed were sitting on a boulder looking down at the bus; he was surprised to find himself nibbling sunflower seeds. It seemed to him that Mohammed had been talking for hours, and he had heard scarcely a word. Now he was again on the subject of the money he thought Amar should have given him for the bicycle three days ago. When he had taken it back to the Frenchman, he had not been able to pay for its rental; with great luck he had managed to borrow enough from a friend who worked in the lumberyard down the street. But now it was the Aid and the friend wanted to be repaid, and anyway, whose fault was it that they had gone to Aïn Malqa, and who had promised to pay for both the bicycles?
Amar had every intention of giving him the money, but he found Mohammed’s insistence annoying, above all at this moment. “With everyone dying you’re worried about a few francs,” he said scornfully. The Nazarene lady had given him an enormous amount of money; how much, he did not know, because he had not yet had an instant’s privacy in which to count it. At all events, now he was very rich, and the little he owed Mohammed did not trouble him. However, he thought it shameful on Mohammed’s part to keep talking about it. Suddenly he turned his entire attention to what Mohammed was saying. “And the thirty rial I had to spend for medicine after you hit me, let them go; they don’t matter.” His apology had thus counted for nothing, or Mohammed would not be reminding him of their fight. What was the good of trying to make a friendship with a boy like this? “Yah, Mohammed,” he said. “You don’t trust me, but that’s only because you think everybody’s like you.” He wanted very much to take out his money and hand over every franc he owed him, just to have done with it, but of course it was out of the question to let him see how much money he had. Mohammed turned a withering glance upon him, saying in disgust: “You have a head like an owl, or a scorpion, or a stone. I don’t know what kind of a head you have.” “Majabekfia,” retorted Amar. “Don’t worry about me.” They sat a long time, perhaps an hour, without speaking, before the tire was finally changed and the bus ready to leave.
Now that theirs was the last bus, once they had started up, the driver felt impelled to go like the wind. They skirted the edges of the abyss at terrific speed, the brakes squealing as they rounded curves, the old motor roaring like a demon when they were not coasting. If Allah had not been with them, Amar thought, on several occasions the bus would surely have hurtled into space. When they approached the place where it had been agreed that they would all stop so that the Istiqlal men could spread out, there was nothing but the empty road. This seemed a bad omen; the men shook their heads and grumbled. For they wanted the learned young men to be with them when they arrived in the city. All the other buses had their quotas of them by now; only this one, through the stupidity of the driver (for they now held him responsible for the delay occasioned by the blowout), remained without its commanders. But as they came almost in sight of the paved road, a small truck loaded high with watermelons appeared around a curve, coming toward them, blowing its horn in an imperative manner; dark arms emerged from both sides and wigwagged furiously. The bus driver slowed, stopped, and everyone stared at the wild faces of the four men in the truck.
“Brother! Brother!” all four cried at once. “Don’t go! They got them all! They killed them!” The four men jumped up and down on the seat, waved their arms and struck each other in their excitement, and the truck driver sketched a dramatic, sweeping semicircle to suggest a machine-gun firing. “By the railroad crossing!” At this news there were groans and curses in the bus, together with the uttering of the names of unfortunate relatives and friends who had left Sidi Bou Chta in the other buses. As the first explosion of frenzy died down and words began to be spoken in more nearly normal tones, it appeared that only a few men had actually been killed by gunfire, the others having been carted off to jail in military trucks; as each bus had arrived, its occupants had been transferred under guard to trucks manned by French soldiers, and had been driven away. The important thing now, if they wanted to get to the Ville Nouvelle, cried the four men, was to bypass the road where the trouble had occurred, take the Meknès road and double back, stopping at a point which they would indicate, having just come from there.
“It’s a police trap,” murmured Mohammed into Amar’s ear; this was the first word to pass between them since the disagreement on the boulder. “Who knows? Maybe they’re chkama. Maybe the others all got through.”
Amar had studied the faces of the men in the truck, and he would have staked his entire future on the veracity of their story. “You’re dizzy,” he told Mohammed, reflecting at the same time that there was one so crafty that he distrusted everyone, which was almost as foolish as trusting everyone.
At all events, the bus driver seemed not to doubt the truth of their account. He waited while the truck backed and turned, and then he began to follow it at a distance of about fifty meters. This was a terrain closed in by steep slopes of bare earth; in the midday sun it had become a little inferno. When they got onto the highway the truck increased its speed, as did the bus, and so there was some breeze inside. The driver shouted to the men sitting silent behind him: “Pray! You’re coming from Sidi Bou Chta!” This seemed an excellent idea. If they passed a police car at Bab el Guissa a pilgrims’ prayer might possibly allay suspicion.
“Oua-a-l ach f’n riebbi,
selliou alih.
Oual’la-a-ah m’selli alih,
karrasou’llah!”
they chanted, as the bus sped along the flat highway across the bridge, frightening two white herons in the river below, and then started to wind its way upward through the tangles of canebrake. This was scarcely the usual moment to invoke divine protection for the voyage, when everyone had returned safely from the pilgrimage, and the bus driver was fully aware of it; the cynicism of his suggestion resided in the fact that he also knew there were probably not more than two Frenchmen in all of Fez who would be aware of it, and neither of them was a policeman. The Moroccans could count on a certain degree of obtuseness in the observational powers of the French.
Since the servant always gains more knowledge of the master than the master can hope to gain of him, the Moroccans knew they could afford imprécisions without being detected, while the French had no such advantages; it was virtually impossible for them to deceive anyone. The Moroccans who had any contact at all with the French knew where their masters went, whom they saw, what they said, how they felt, what they ate, when and with whom they drank and slept, and why they did all these things, whereas the French had only the most sketchy, mechanical and inflexible understanding of the tastes, customs and daily life of the natives in whose land they lived. If an officer in the cavalry showed less skill than usual one day in mounting his horse, his orderly saw it, began to speculate as to the reason, and secretly spied on him. If a functionary were smoking a cigarette which was not one of his accustomed brand, the shoeshine boy noticed it and commented upon it to his colleagues. If the mistress of the house drank only one cup of café au lait when on other mornings she habitually drank two, the maid’s curiosity was aroused, and she mentioned it to the scrubwoman and the laundress. The only way the French could preserve even the illusion of privacy was simply to pretend the natives did not exist, and this automatically gave the natives an enormous advantage. Thus it did not seem likely that the police would see anything strange in their chanting at this moment; on the contrary, it might give the bus an inoffensive air, for they had found that if they appeared to be occupied with religious matters, the French generally let them alone.
Where were they going and what did they intend to do when they got there? Not one of them c
ould have answered the question, nor could the question have been posed; it would not have been in key with the prevailing temper, more suited to the chanting of prayers than to the elaboration of projects. They knew that if an angel were to appear suddenly in the sky above the fruit orchards they were passing, and were to give them the clear choice between renouncing their vows of vengeance and dying, they would gladly give up their lives then and there, rather than betray their brothers in Islam. But no angel came, and they were not far from the city walls.
Alone among all the passengers Amar was working out a plan of action: no one but he had a mother and sister in the Medina. The mountain men’s vested interest in the holiness of the city provided them with excitement, but it was excitement of the sort that comes when many people make a common decision to defend a cause, and it awakened none of the desperate intelligence of the individual who finds himself in extremities. Mohammed’s family had gone to Casablanca to pass the Aid there with relatives, and he was staying with a married sister in Fez-Djedid outside the walls, which meant that not only was he free from worries about the possible fate of his mother and sisters at the hands of the partisans, but could come and go as he pleased. This explained, even if it did not excuse, his obvious lack of interest in Amar’s predicament. All he wanted was his bicycle money, and that Amar intended to give him as soon as he had a minute to hide himself and count it out; he would hand it to him and say good-bye, for he wanted to get rid of him before he set to work.
They were approaching the big curve by Bab Jamaï, which brought the road up out of the orchards to within a few meters of the walls, and then swung it immediately away again, out onto the stony mountainside. Several hundred soldiers were there, moving about among the tents that had been hastily set up along the outside of the ramparts. But the pilgrims looked straight ahead, chanting with ferocity, and pounded the sides of the bus and the seats. On up the hill they went, their clear voices floating out over the empty cemeteries. When they got to the top, Amar could not keep from stealing a glance down at the Medina. No columns of smoke rose from its midst; it looked the same as every other day. The Nazarene gentleman had told him that the Istiqlal spread many lies. He knew that; everyone told lies. It was for the intelligent man to distinguish truth from lies, just as it was only the intelligent man who knew how to lie in a way that made it next to impossible for others to find his lies and identify them as such. As he looked at the Medina stretched out down there in the glaring sun, unchanged, it occurred to him to question the truth of what they had said, but only for an instant. If it were not yet true, it soon would be. His problem was to get home, if possible before it was too late, but in any case to get there.