At one point Moulay Ali had ceased pacing the floor, to stand merely looking at Amar in fascination; now he resumed walking back and forth, perplexedly rubbing his chin. The sunset was over; the light in the room was swiftly fading. “Tell Mahmoud to bring a lamp,” he said to Lahcen, who rose and handed him the revolver before he went out. Moulay Ali laid it quietly on the table beside the typewriter and stood watching Amar. He picked up the money and flicked it several times with his fingernails. Then, apparently having made a decision, he crossed to where Amar was, knelt, and touched his shoulder. Amar lifted his head, but turned away miserably and remained silent.
“When you feel like talking,” Moulay Ali told him gently, “tell me the whole story.”
Amar sighed deeply and shook his head. “What good will it do?” he murmured.
“That’s for me to decide when I hear it,” said Moulay Ali somewhat less gently. “I want to hear everything, everything you’ve done since you left my house.”
Still sighing, Amar picked himself off the floor and sat again on the hassock. He described his trip back to the Ville Nouvelle, the storm, the bus ride, the fair, the sailor doll, and all the other details of that evening. Once or twice he heard Moulay Ali chuckle; this gave him a little incentive to continue. The part about his meeting with the two tourists seemed to interest his listener considerably; he asked a good many questions about them, but finally let the story get on to hearing Benani’s voice behind him in the street when he was walking with the tourists and the police. At this point the door opened, and Mahmoud came in carrying a large oil lamp which he set on the table. He was about to go out again, but Moulay Ali stopped him.
The light of the lamp shone into Amar’s face. “I think you want something to eat,” said Moulay Ali, looking at him carefully. To Amar it seemed a long time ago that hunger, and even thirst, had existed in the world. And so if he said yes, it was only out of politeness toward his host.
Mahmoud shut the door behind him. “Go on,” prompted Moulay Ali. “Did you know Benani thought you had been arrested, or didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew it,” Amar answered, and he went on with his recital, too tired to choose between relevant and extraneous detail and thus including everything that came into his head—the carving on the beams in the tourist’s room, the lady’s loquaciousness, the mechanism of the flush toilet, the fat French waiter who, once the tourist was out of the room, would keep bringing him more food every two minutes and pinch his cheek while he ate it, how he had manged to persuade Mohammed Lalami to go with him to Sidi Bou Chta by telling him the Nazarene lady was eager for love and had slept with him the night before, and how Mohammed, once he was alone with her, had been so nervous that he had said all the wrong things. “And then we watched the Aïssaoua and the Haddaoua and the Jilala and the Hamacha and the Derqaoua and the Guennaoua and all that filth, because the Nazarene liked to see the dancing.” He made a wry face at the memory. “It makes you sick to your stomach to look at it, all those people jumping up and down like monkeys.”
“Yes,” agreed Moulay Ali. “And then?”
“Then I heard what they were all saying about the partisans in the Medina, and I wanted to go home.”
“So you came to me instead. Why? Did you think I could get you into the Medina?”
Amar admitted he had thought that, and Moulay Ali laughed, amused and a little flattered by his ingenuousness. “My friend,” he told him, “if I could get you into the Medina I could make every Frenchman leave Morocco tomorrow morning. Go on.”
But Amar seemed not to hear. The full import of what the other had said was only now reaching him; he looked into Moulay Ali’s face desperately. It was useless to say: “My sister, my mother.” There were thousands of sisters and mothers. But he said it anyway. Moulay Ali smiled sadly.
The tray that Mahmoud brought had bread and soup on it. “Bismil’lah,” murmured Amar, and he began to chew a piece of bread mechanically. Moulay Ali, his bowl of soup tilted in front of his face, observed him carefully over its rim, saw hunger slowly fill the boy’s consciousness as he tasted food. He said nothing until Mahmoud had returned with a second tray, this time with a large earthenware tajine of lamb, eggplant and noodles.
“Perhaps I can help you,” he said finally. “I have a few contacts at different spots. I might be able to get news from your house.”
Amar stared. The idea of finding out about his family without going home himself had not occurred to him.
“Would you like that?” said Moulay Ali. Amar did not answer. What good was hearing about his family if he could not be there to see them with his own eyes? And how could he believe whatever news came to him, good or bad? But he saw that Moulay Ali was doing his best, was trying to be helpful, and so he said: “I’d be very happy, Sidi.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Now tell me the rest.”
There was not very much more to tell, said Amar. Mohammed and the lady had been talking in French about the fighting in the Medina. He had been too unhappy to listen to what they were saying. The lady had waited until Mohammed had stepped outside, and then she had called Amar over to her, opened her pocketbook and, making sure that no one was looking, put the folded bills into his hand. When he described the gestures she made to indicate an imaginary gun, Moulay Ali interrupted, exclaiming delightedly: “Ah, a woman with a head!” And when he came to the episode of the buses and the carrying off to jail of all the mountain men, Moulay Ali, looking very grim, said: “Good! Good! The more the better.” Amar was startled, because he had expected quite the opposite reaction from him. Perhaps his mystification showed in his face, for a moment later Moulay Ali elaborated. “When they get back to the mountains not one of them will be able to hear the word France without feeling his heart ready to burst with hatred.” Amar thought a bit. “That’s true,” he agreed. “But some of them were killed.”
“They died for freedom,” said Moulay Ali shortly. “Remember that.”
They did not speak for a moment. Through the open windows, along with the constantly increasing night wind, came the sound of a dog howling, from some distance away. Amar looked up, and saw in the shining glass panes distorted reflections of their movements against the blackness beyond. Mahmoud had brought a big bowl of sliced oranges prepared with strips of cinnamon bark and rose water. When they had finished Moulay Ali sat back, wiped his face with his napkin, and said: “Yes. They died for freedom. And that’s why I’m not going to ask your pardon for being rough with you. It would be an insult to them. I was suspicious, and I was wrong, but I wasn’t wrong to be suspicious. Do you understand? At first I thought: No, he couldn’t have gone to the French, because if he had, he certainly wouldn’t come back here.”
“Ah, you see?” Amar said, pleased.
“But then I thought: Wait. They’ve used him as a guide, and sent him in alone, and they’re outside waiting.”
“Oh!” said Amar. He was thinking that now if by some terrible misfortune the French did manage to find Moulay Ali, he would be certain to suspect that Amar had had something to do with it; he decided to let Moulay Ali know what was in his mind.
“No, no, no,” replied Moulay Ali consolingly. “They’d have been in the house long before this if they’d come with you. The day a Frenchman learns patience the camels will pray in the Karouine.”
These reassuring words set off a whole series of mechanisms inside Amar which resulted almost immediately in an overpowering desire to close his eyes; he could feel his head being turned to stone, and his body being rapidly immured in the paralysis of sleep. Moulay Ali was talking, but he heard only the sound of his voice.
“Come, come,” the voice said sharply. “You can’t just fall asleep like that.”
Moulay Ali had risen, and was standing above him. “Get up, and come with me,” he said. With a flashlight in one hand he led him down the stairs through the hot little room, to the back gallery, where a man lying on a mat in front of the door grunted and sat up as Moulay Ali s
tepped over him, saying softly: “Yah, Aziz.” They picked their way along the uneven floor.
Another door was opened; the inquisitive beam of the flashlight played briefly around its walls. There was the mattress. “I think that will take you through to morning,” said Moulay Ali. “Incha’Allah,” Amar replied. Then he thanked Moulay Ali with what sense and force he had left, and let himself drop onto the mattress. “ ’Lah imsik bekhir,” said Moulay Ali as he closed the door. The crickets were singing outside the window.
CHAPTER 32
There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience.
Amar awoke, heard the cackling of geese against a soft background of bird song, listened for a moment to the unfamiliar sounds about the house—the closing of a door, words exchanged between servants and the noises they made in their work—and without even bothering to open his eyes, sank into a melancholy but comfortable state of nostalgia for his childhood, that other lifetime finished so long ago at Kherib Jerad. He remembered little events that he had not thought of since the day they had happened, and one big event: the time he had got into a fight with Smaïl, his only friend among the boys of the place, who instead of hitting him had all at once sunk his teeth in the back of Amar’s neck and refused to open his jaws until the men had come and beaten him. He still had the marks of those sharp white teeth; if the barber shaved his neck a little too high they were visible. And that night a delegation of the elders of the village had come with lanterns and torches to see his father, to apologize, and, which was much more important to them, to try and exact a word of forgiveness from Amar, for if Amar refused, everything would go badly for them until they brought an offering to the young Cherif who had been wronged by one of their number. And Amar did refuse, being still in a good deal of pain, so that the next day they came again with a beautiful white sheep which they gave his father in order that their crops and homes might be spared the displeasure of Allah. His father had been unhappy about it. “Why wouldn’t you forgive Smaïl?” he asked him. “I hate him,” Amar had replied heatedly, and there was no more to be said about it.
He remembered the river and the coves between its high clay banks where he had played; and the fine clothes he always had worn on the bus trip to Kherib Jerad, for in those days there had been money, and his mother had spent a great deal of it keeping Amar in capes and trousers and vests and slippers made for him by the best tailors and cobblers in Fez. He remembered, and he listened to the birds singing near by and farther away, and it seemed to him that the sweet sadness he felt would never stop as long as he lived, because it was he; he had ceased being himself by having been cut off from his home. Now he was no one, lying on a mattress nowhere, and there was no reason to do anything more than simply continue to be that no one. Occasionally he slept for a moment, dipping softly downward, so that the horizon of being disappeared; then he came up again. It was like floating on a gentle ocean, following the will of the waves.
At one point, toward mid-morning, the door opened quietly and Moulay Ali looked in at him, on his way to his office in the tower, but it happened to be a moment when he slumbered; Moulay Ali shut the door and left him alone. Again when it was nearly noon he returned, and seeing him still lying there, decided to awaken him. Unceremoniously he shook him by the shoulder and told him it was very late; then he went and called Mahmoud, who came and led him, still more asleep than otherwise, to a room where there was a pail of cold water and a cake of soap. By the time he had washed thoroughly he was wide awake. When he re-emerged onto the gallery Mahmoud was just arriving with a huge copper tray which he set on its legs outside the bathroom door. “Eat here,” said Mahmoud. “It’s cooler.”
While Amar was eating his breakfast Moulay Ali came along the gallery. He looked weary and unhappy. “Good morning. How did you awaken?” he inquired, and without waiting for a reply he walked on toward his office. At the door he turned and said: “I may have news for you later.” Then Mahmoud came by to see if Amar had finished; since he had not, he stood looking down at him, watching him eat. “You can’t go out of the house, you know,” he told him suddenly. This information was not a surprise to Amar, nor did it interest him. There was nothing he wanted to do outside, in any case, no one to see, nowhere to go— only the olive trees, the hot sunlight and the cicadas shrilling. He was quite content to sit in the house and bask in the listlessness that the day had brought.
Apparently Mahmoud sensed the apathy in which he was submerged, for when he lifted the tray to carry it away he said: “Come,” and led him to the big room where he had sat with the boys the other day. Now it was in even greater disorder, with newspapers lying open on the cushions, unemptied ashtrays here and there in the middle of the floor, and in a corner a small table holding a disemboweled radio, its parts spread out in confusion around its empty case. On one couch there were several copies of an Egyptian illustrated review. He sat down and began to thumb through them; in each one there were some pictures of Morocco. French policemen pointed to a long table laden with pistols and daggers, wounded Moslems were helped along a street by their countrymen, a child wandered in the ruins of a bombed-out building, five Moslems lay in the twisted postures of death in a Casablanca street, the traffic going by at only a step from their bodies, while a French soldier delicately indicated them for the photographer with the tip of his boot. It was hard to understand why these publications should be so strictly prohibited, when they had exactly the same photographs in them as the French magazines that were on sale outside the shops of the Ville Nouvelle. But then, was there any way of comprehending the laws made by the French, save to assume that they all had been made with the same express purpose, that of confusing, harassing, insulting and torturing the Moslems? On other pages there were pictures of Egyptian soldiers in smart uniforms driving tanks, inspecting machine guns, demonstrating to students the technique of throwing hand grenades, watching army maneuvers in the desert, and marching through the magnificent streets of Cairo in their khaki shorts. Everyone looked happy and healthy; the women and girls waved from the windows of the apartment houses. He turned back to the pictures of Morocco and studied them, taking a masochistic pleasure in remarking the contrast between the scenes of wreckage and death and the platoons of triumphant young soldiers.
He looked around the room; it seemed to him the very essence of the sadness and remoteness of Morocco. Maghreb-al-Aqsa, that was the name of his country—the Farthest West. Exactly, the extremity, the limit of Islam, beyond which there was nothing but the empty sea. Those who lived in Morocco could only look on with wistfulness and envy at the glorious events which were transfiguring the other Moslem nations. Their country was like a vast prison whose inmates had almost relinquished all hope of freedom, and yet Amar’s father had known it when it was the richest and most beautiful land in all Islam. And even Amar could remember the pears and peaches that had grown in the orchards outside the walls of Fez near Bab Sidi bou Jida before the French had diverted the flow of water to their own lands and left the trees to wither and perish in the summer heat.
The room smelled strongly of kerosene: someone had been careless in filling the lamps. He got up and wandered about listlessly. Yes, the room was Morocco itself; there was not even any way of seeing out, because the windows were all high above the level of anyone’s head. He walked to the door and stood listening to the long sound of the bees, wondering vaguely whether, if a man were to smash their nests and be stung, their poison would be powerful enough to kill him.
Presently Moulay Ali
appeared in the doorway coming from the back gallery, and seeing Amar, approached and took him by the arm. “You shouldn’t have come here,” he told him. “I can’t let you go, and you’ll get very tired of being shut up here.” He led him back into the room and closed the door. “But the world’s very bad this day, very bad.” From his pocket he took Amar’s handkerchief with the money in it, the packet of notes the Nazarene lady had given him, and the little paper of kif he had bought for Mustapha at the Café Berkane. This last he dropped into Amar’s hand quickly and with great distaste. “What are you doing with that filth?” he demanded. “I thought you were a derri with some sense.”
Amar, who had forgotten the existence of the tiny bundle, was horrified to see it lying there in his own hand. “That’s not mine,” he exclaimed, looking down at it.
“It was in your pocket.”
“I mean, it’s for my brother. I got it for him.”
“If you loved your brother you wouldn’t put chains on his legs, would you?”
Amar had no answer. Moulay Ali had just put into clear words what he had only vaguely hoped: that the kif might indeed be a chain to bind Mustapha. If he pretended innocence he would seem abysmally stupid in the eyes of Moulay Ali; if he did not, he would probably think him incredibly wicked. Moulay Ali stood looking at him expectantly.
“We don’t get on very well,” Amar finally murmured.
But now Moulay Ali’s face was rapidly changing. “You mean,” he said incredulously, “that he likes kif and you give it to him to ruin his health and weaken his mind, so he’ll never be worth anything? Is that it?”