Gradually Amar fell into a contemplative state, just sitting and watching the men slowly become drunk. No one paid him any attention. Their voices grew louder constantly, and they had ceased to stop and listen to the crickets outside, even for an instant. There was no silence any more in their world. Each one talked to impress the others with his intelligence and erudition. Even Lahcen was arguing with a thin, bald young man who obviously had no desire to be talking to him, and kept trying to get into the conversation which was going on opposite him. These men had no understanding of, no love for, either Allah or the people they pretended to be helping. Whatever they might manage to build would be blown away very quickly. Allah would see to that, because it would have been built without His guidance.
He sat there alone, looking at them, and it was as if he were far away on the top of a mountain, seeing them from a great distance. Sins are finished, the potter had told him. That was what people believed now, and so there was nothing but sin. For if men dared take it upon themselves to decide what was sin and what was not, a thing which only Allah had the wisdom to do, then they committed the most terrible sin of all, the ultimate one, that of attempting to replace Him. He saw it very clearly, and he knew why he felt that they were all damned beyond hope of redemption.
Suddenly Moulay Ali had brought out an oud from behind the cushions stacked in the corner near him, and was tossing it across to the doctor, who removed his glasses and began to tune it. For a while he plucked at the strings tentatively, perhaps not wanting to start a song until the conversation had worn itself down a bit. This did not happen; almost everyone continued to talk. Finally Moulay Ali clapped his hands impatiently for silence, and little by little the words stopped flowing.
“Aïcha bent Aïssa,” said Moulay Ali. “Now, listen to this, Amar. Listen carefully. This is for you. He wants to do big things,” he confided jovially to the others. “I promised him this song.”
It was not true, Amar thought. He wanted nothing. Not to do big things for the Party, not to hear music, not to speak to anyone. He felt absolutely alone in the room, alone in this alien world of Moslems who were not Moslems, but he would sit and listen, for the song had begun. It had a simple tune and simple words, and, he thought at first, a simple story about a woman whose son was sixteen years old and belonged to the Party. When his number came up, and it was his turn to go out and commit the murder assigned to him, and they came and knocked at the door of his house, the mother told the men to come into the house for a moment. They went in, and she said: “Where is the gun?” and they handed it to her. Then she shot her son. But with the advent of this brutal and unexpected act, the song passed beyond his comprehension. He still listened, but the song, having shocked him, had ceased thereby to make sense. Then, sang the doctor, she handed back the gun to them, saying: “Get a man for your work—not a boy.” That was all there was to it.
“She really exists, you know,” murmured the student. “She lives in Casablanca, and the story is perfectly true.” Lahcen, greatly touched, sniffed and rubbed his eyes with his sleeve. “He’ll cry at a song,” thought Amar disdainfully, “but if he saw the woman shoot the boy, he’d just stand there like a stone.”
“Well, what about it?” cried Moulay Ali to Amar. “What do you think of it?”
Amar was silent, not knowing what was expected of him. Still Moulay Ali waited; in the end Amar said exactly what he was thinking. “I don’t understand why she killed her son.”
Moulay Ali was triumphant. “I didn’t think you would. That’s why I wanted you to hear it. She shot him because she knew he wasn’t ready, and the Party was more dear to her heart than her own son.” Amar looked confused. “She saw that when the French caught him he wouldn’t die like a man, his lips closed tight, but like a boy, crying and telling them whatever they wanted to know. That’s why she shot him, my friend.”
Now Amar understood, but still he did not feel the truth of it, or even believe it, for that matter. “And you say there really was such a woman?”
Everyone began to speak of friends who claimed to know the legendary Aïcha bent Aïssa. Some declared she lived in Fedala, the doctor insisted she ran a bacal in the quarter of Aïn Bouzia, and the bald young man seemed to think she had been made one of the leaders of the Party and sent, he believed, to Boujad or Settat or some such place. In any case, they all adhered firmly to the theory of her flesh-and-blood existence. All, save perhaps Moulay Ali, who merely said: “The Party used to have a lot of young boys in it. They won’t take them any more, except very special ones, and the new policy’s largely due to that song.”
This time Mahmoud brought a tray of smaller glasses and two freshly opened bottles of cognac. His arrival was greeted by a certain amount of discreet applause by several of the guests; this in itself was proof to Amar, if any were needed, that they were no longer completely sober. The doctor sang several more songs, from which the attention of the others gradually strayed, so that in the end he was singing and strumming for his own pleasure. Amar sat for a long time watching them, not taking any part in their jokes and arguments, and feeling more and more solitary and miserable. At one point Moulay Ali called over to him, saying: “Zduq, Amar, it looks as though you’d be staying on awhile here with me.”
Amar smiled feebly, hoping the other would not suspect what was passing through his mind as a result of that remark: a conscious determination to escape, in one way or another. Even the open fields, he thought, would be preferable to being shut into this house. He had money in his pocket now, and although he did not know his sister’s address in Meknès, he was certain that he could find her house somehow. He put his hand into his pocket and felt the money there; the notes between his fingers excited him. He would buy a pair of real shoes, and some new trousers. For the first time, he thought of the money in terms of its buying power. But where would he buy the shoes? Perhaps in Meknès, incha’Allah. He was very sleepy; his eyes could scarcely stay open. Being near the door, he waited until the next time Mahmoud entered with more bottles and more glasses, and slipped out behind him just as he made his entrance. The gallery was dark, but the moon overhead shone down into the courtyard. Until he got to the back gallery he could hear the raucous laughter and the high thin notes of the oud, but once he was there the silence was complete, save for the countless little songs of the crickets. He felt his way cautiously to the door of the room where he had slept the night before, went in, and said a lengthy prayer because of the darkness. Then he lay down and instantly fell asleep.
He had been traveling great distances, and he did not want to come back, but a light shone in his face. He opened his eyes. A monster stood over him. He sprang up, crying out: “Ah!” but lost his balance and fell back down onto the mattress, and as he fell he knew it was only Moulay Ali standing there with a lantern. But the light shining from beneath made his face look like the face of a fat white devil, and his eyes were two round black holes. Amar laughed apologetically, and said: “Khalatini! You frightened me!”
Moulay Ali paid no attention, but held the lantern up higher, and whispered: “Come.” The urgency with which he had uttered the one word did not strike Amar until he was already on his feet; then the relief he had felt after his initial fright began to give way to a new uneasiness, more rational but also very disturbing. “He’s drunk,” he told himself, as they went along the gallery, their shadows mingling on the ruined wall. Then he heard the voices of the others, and they all sounded like madmen. Some were whispering, some were laughing senselessly, in that their laughter had the sound but not the meaning of laughter, and some were talking, but about nothing at all. “Yes, very nice.” “I thought that if she said it was like that we would go.” “And do you like cigarettes?” “Oh, I, yes, I smoke. I like to smoke.” “It would be better up there, if you knew what you have to know.” “We came back, and, and, it was very hot.” The intonations and rhythms were somehow wrong, too, and he had the impression that if the men had been asked what they had said, not
one of them could have told, because the words had been merely the first words to come into their heads. Then someone—the doctor, he supposed—began to play on the oud, and these slight sounds, making a recognizable melody, mysteriously succeeded in giving the scene he had been listening to a semblance of sanity.
When they had reached the doorway to the large room, Amar saw that the guests were all standing. “My friends were about to go,” explained Moulay Ali. (Where to, at this time of night, on the backs of donkeys? Amar wondered, but only in passing.) “And then I mentioned that you played the flute, and they all want to hear you.”
“Oh!” Amar exclaimed, very much taken aback.
“Just one piece,” urged Moulay Ali in a voice of velvet, pinching his arm. Amar stared at him: he seemed very odd indeed, and his eyes, even in this light, still looked like enormous black holes. He gazed around at the others in the room; they too had something extremely strange about them. Again he wondered if it could be the effect of alcohol, or hashish, perhaps, but he had seen plenty of men under the influence of one or the other, and their behavior had been completely different. The idea passed through his mind that Moulay Ali had not really come at all and wakened him. In that case he was still lying there in the comfortable dark of the little room; it was one of those dreams where all things—the people, the houses and trees, the sky and the earth—are doomed at the outset to be merged in one gigantic vortex of destruction. Doomed from the start, but unless the dreamer is on the lookout he may not realize what is going to happen, because it is a maelstrom which begins to move only after a long while, declaring its presence in its own good time. In the end, very likely, everything would begin going around, one thing becoming another, and they would all be sucked down into emptiness, silently screaming, and clawing at one another with gestures of the most exquisite delicacy. In the meantime he had to pretend to be Amar being awake.
“I have no lirah,” he said, certain that Moulay Ali would produce one that very instant, which he did, taking it up from a hassock behind him.
“But I play very badly. Only a little,” he protested. Moulay Ali stroked his arm eagerly. “Baraka’llahoufik. Baraka’llahoufik,” he murmured. Was it really Moulay Ali, and was any one of these men the person he had been before? Or was it Amar who had changed while he slept, that now everything should be so different?
“I’ll play a piece,” said Moulay Ali. He lifted the little reed flute to his mouth. Straightway everyone was utterly silent; the words that had no meaning, the strained and vacant laughter, the frantic whispered monosyllables, which of all the sounds they had been making seemed the only valid ones, all were suspended in a flash, and only the small windy voice of the flute remained to take their place. Moulay Ali executed a few warming-up phrases, and then, walking alone out onto the gallery, began to play, without any particular virtuosity, a slightly altered version of a song called Tanja Alia. Amar watched the guests: they looked straight in front of them, as if they were not listening, but were imagining how they would look if they were really listening. “Yah latif!” he thought. “They’re all bewitched.” That was what was wrong with them; at least, it seemed a more reasonable hypothesis to Amar at this moment than any other he could invent. A moment before, they had been turning around and bumping into each other. Now they all stood completely still, close together, intent on the music that managed, weak as it was, to fill the emptiness of the night. When Moulay Ali had stopped, even before he reappeared in the doorway, they began to move around again distractedly, staying close together, as if no one of them could bear to think of being at more than an arm’s length from at least two others.
“Here,” said Moulay Ali, handing him the flute. “Now you’ve got to play. Come.” He led him over to the cushions where they had sat together at dinner. “Now, make yourself comfortable, and show me how you play Tanja Alia.”
The more quickly he complied, thought Amar, the sooner he could go back to bed. He lay back on the cushions, put one leg up over the other, and began to play. After a few phrases, Moulay Ali smiled tautly, said: “Good. Beautiful,” and walked back to the other end of the room. The guests had gone out the door onto the gallery. “Listen from there,” he heard Moulay Ali murmur to them, while he breathed to start a new phrase. And a moment later he heard him whisper something else, something very curious indeed, that is, if he had not been mistaken. What he thought he had heard, behind and between the reedy sounds the flute made around his head, were the words: “It’s Chemsi; don’t forget. I know his walk. Don’t forget.”
Each time he opened his eyes he was aware of Moulay Ali’s form standing over there beside the door, listening. It pleased him that he should want to hear him play, although he would rather have played for him alone than with all the others listening, too.
Chemsi. Who was Chemsi? Amar thought, as he brought to earth a long, slowly descending cadence that fluttered, quivered, tried to rise, and finally settled and lay still. Chemsi, of course, was the boy to whom Moulay Ali had handed all the newspaper clippings that first lost afternoon so long ago. But he was not interested in Chemsi, or in whether or not he had truly heard his name pronounced a few minutes back; he was bent on fashioning the most beautifully formed phrases of notes he could devise. Sometimes Allah helped him; sometimes He did not. Tonight he felt that there was a possibility of such help. When he himself became the music, so that he was no longer there, save as a single, advancing point on the long thread that the music spun as it moved across eternity, that was the moment when the music became a bridge from his heart to other people’s hearts, and when he returned to himself he knew that Allah had lifted him up out of the world for an instant and that for that short space of time he had had the h’dia, the gift.
He played until he was alone in distant places. Allah did not help him, but it did not matter. The loneliness that was in his heart, the longing for someone who could understand him if he spoke, these came out in the fragile strings of sound he made with his breath and his fingers. Thinking of nothing, he played on, and slowly the person for whom he played ceased being the figure by the door, became that other presence he had become aware of back in the tower early in the evening, someone whose existence in the world meant the possibility of hope. He stopped for an instant, and in his head, indissolubly a part of that happiness liberated by the idea of the other being, he heard a second music—like singing coming from a far-off sunlit shore, infinitely lovely and inexpressibly tender, a filament of song so tenuous that it might be only the mind remembering a music it had never heard save in dreams. He lay still, hearing it, unable to draw the breath that would destroy it, perhaps forever. It was not from Allah, it was here, and yet he had not known that this world had anything so precious to offer. And when he finally had to breathe, and the other music ceased, as he had known it would, as naturally as if he had been thinking of him all the time, he saw in his mind the Nazarene man, a puzzling smile on his lips, the way he had looked in the hotel room the first evening.
At any moment Moulay Ali would say: “Go on,” or “Thank you,” and Amar wanted to think of the Nazarene. He had been a friend; perhaps with time they could even have understood one another’s hearts. And Amar had left him, sneaked away from Sidi Bou Chta without even saying good-bye. He opened his eyes and glanced toward the end of the room. The dark form was still there, unmoving. He sat up suddenly and looked at it. It was a jacket hanging on a nail in the shadows beyond the door.
CHAPTER 34
The lirah rolled down between two cushions where he had dropped it. Almost as soon as he was off the mattress, he was at the door, looking up and down the empty gallery. He knew exactly what had hapened, and he went over it all in his mind as he ran, checking each point. And he knew what would come next, unless he was unbelievably lucky. It was to look for that luck that he raced now to the stuffy little antechamber and up the moonlit stairs to the tower room, deserted save for the night wind that came through the open windows. There was only one side of the tow
er that interested him, and that was the side with the view of the roof; fortunately one of the windows on that side was ajar, so he would not have to run the risk of making a noise in pushing it open. He looked down, judged the distance to the top of the gable, a difficult calculation to make in the moonlight; for it seemed further as he sat on the window sill gauging it than it proved to be an instant later when he landed on it. He had thrust his sandals into his pocket, and his bare feet made almost no sound as he hit.
There was no place to hide on the roof where he could not be picked out by a flashlight either from below or from the tower; that he ascertained very quickly. What he wanted to know, however, was whether the tower itself, which he had never seen from the outside, had a flat roof or a dome, and now he saw, and gave thanks, for it was flat. The problem for the moment was to lift himself back up to the window sill and from there to the very top, managing on the way to close the window so as to put them off the scent as much as possible. They were looking first of all, of course, for Moulay Ali, a plump, unathletic middle-aged man, and it would not be reasonable to expect him to have climbed out the window and swung himself up to the top of the tower. In fact, Amar thought, as he worked at the feat, he did not know any boys of his age who could do it, either. The last part had to be done with faith that the tiny concrete cornice to which his fingers clung up there above his head would not detach itself as he hung his entire weight upon it. On his way up he had shut the window without being really able to shut it, since the only handle was on the inside. But if a strong gust of wind did not suddenly blow in through the tower from the west, it would stay as it was.