The Spider's House (22 page)

Here a public fountain dribbled in its niche; women and girls waited with their pails under its blue and green tiled vault. 1352, read the smaller tiles under the florid Arabic script that, praising the institution of monotheism, warned against substitutes for the one and only variety of it. “1352; that makes it a little over twenty years old,” he thought. The constant slopping of water from the pails had made a cloaca of the street at this point; the clay had turned to viscid and slippery gray mud, and milky water bubbled up to fill each new footprint.

“Now, really, I say!” cried Moss. When he was pretending to be outraged, his voice became sharper, his accent more exaggeratedly Oxonian. “W
here are you taking me?”

“You’ve been through here half a dozen times before,” Stenham shouted over his shoulder.

Eleven hundred years ago the city had been begun at the bottom of a concavity in the hills, a formation which had the contours of a slightly tilted bowl; through the centuries as it grew, a vast, eternally spreading construction of cedar wood, marble, earth and tiles, it had climbed up the sides and over the rim of the bowl. Since the center was also the lowest part, all the passageways led to it; one had to go down first, and then choose the direction in which one wanted to climb. Except the paths which followed the river’s course out into the orchards, all ways led upward from the heart of the city. The long climb through the noonday heat was tiring. An hour after they had started out they
were still struggling up the crowded lanes of the western hill. The mist had been totally dissipated, the sky had gone blue, hard and distant. The street widened, was suddenly filled with small boys on their way home from school. Moss and Stenham were finally able to walk abreast. Through the din of childish voices Moss said: “Will you tell me where we’re coming out? I should have said there was no way of getting through the walls this far down. Don’t you think we should have tried to get to Bab el Hadid?”

“D’you think so?” Stenham made his voice deliberately vague. He knew perfectly well where he was going, but the fun consisted in seeming to be wandering until the last minute, and then making a sudden virtuoso turn which would bring Moss out into a place that would be all the more startling for being completely familiar.

“I expect you’ve got one of your impressive conjurer’s tricks up your sleeve,” murmured Moss with a false air of resignation, “but I must say that this time I don’t quite see how you can.”

“No trick at all,” Stenham assured him simply. “We’re merely taking the most direct route to the Zitoun. Or, at least, I think we are. As soon as we get to the next turn I can tell you.”

The next turn took them along a short dusty lane. Under an archway ahead a native policeman in a fez stood talking to a Senegalese soldier. As they stepped beneath the arch the breeze hit their faces, and there was the sound of a fast-running torrent. A panorama of hills lay before them.

“You
are
extraordinary!” said Moss delightedly. “I think you broke the doorway through the wall yourself. What’s it called? Or has it a name?”

Stenham crossed the road and stood at the edge of the parapet looking over the narrow valley to the green slopes beyond. “Of course it has a name. They call it Bab Dar el Pacha.”

“Oh, do shut up!” cried Moss. “You
know
there’s no such gate. I’ve learned them all by rote, from Bab Segma to Bab Mahrouk and back again, and there’s no such gate in the list.”

“You’d better amend your list. Bab Dar el Pacha’s a new gate they hacked in the wall twenty or thirty years ago so the Pacha could get a car up to his door.”

“Vandalism,” Moss remarked.

There was a short climb from here up to the hotel. Students from the College of Moulay Idriss came coasting down the hill on bicycles, going home to lunch, most of them wearing hornrimmed spectacles, and all of them clothed in formless European suits that had never seen an iron or a sponge since the day they had been made.

Less spectacular than the tall trembling poplars that lined the road, but of more interest to the small boys who swarmed there, were the mulberry trees growing by the stream. The boys swished their long bamboo poles violently through the foliage above: the leaves sailed down and the green berries fell. Kenzie’s yellow MG was parked in front of the Zitoun’s entrance. It was covered with children; they were standing on the headlights and bumper, climbing over the doors and fighting on the front seat for the honor of sitting at the steering wheel. When Stenham and Moss arrived abreast of the car, the youth who stood beside it, studiously inscribing the word
MOHAMMED
with a ball pen on the gray canvas top, did not move. Probably he did not consider his contribution to the collection of scribblings which the car bore to be of much importance; there were so many others more showy and startling. Grinning faces, hands of Fatima, and various devices in both Roman and Arabic script had been scratched into the paint with nails and pebbles.

“Watch this,” said Stenham. He went up close to the youth, who glanced at him and continued his careful work.

“
Chnou hada?
What are you doing?” he asked the boy.

The boy smiled. “Nothing,” he answered simply.

Stenham pointed at the letters written on the cloth. “And that? What’s that?”

“An automobile.” The coldness that had come into his voice was doubtless due to the fact that he thought the Nazarene gentleman was taking him for an ignorant country boy.

“No, that word.”

“Mohammed.”

“Why did you write it?”

“Because it’s my name.”

“But why did you write it on the car?”

The youth shrugged, making it apparent that he considered this inquisition without cause or interest, and raised his hand again to complete the flourishes he was designing around the already written name. But Stenham seized the hand and pulled it away with some force. Some of the smaller children had drawn near and were watching. “Get out of here!” he yelled at them. They retreated to a safer distance.

“What’s the matter with all of you?” He addressed his words to the adolescent, who still held the pen in his hand as if he were determined to finish what doubtless seemed to him a fine example of his signature. There was, of course, no answer, and so he was forced to continue. “That won’t come off. Don’t you know that?” Still there was no answer.

Moss came nearer, and beaming at the boy, said in his mellifluous if slightly English-sounding French: “Automobiles are very expensive. You shouldn’t spoil them.”

Now the boy reacted. “I haven’t spoiled it at all,” he said with dignity.

“But look!” exclaimed Moss, pointing to the disfigurations everywhere on the yellow paint. “See what the boys in this town have done! All that was done since this gentleman came here two weeks ago. It’s going to cost him a lot of money to repair all that.”

“How much?” said the youth impassively.

Moss thought quickly. “Perhaps fifty thousand francs. Or more.”

The youth’s face brightened. “He could sell it and buy a new one.”

Stenham could not contain himself. “
Mahboul!
” he yelled. “You’re an idiot! Get away from the car, you and all the rest of you! Go on! Go on!” He pushed the youth roughly out into the road, returned and lifted two of the smaller boys out of the front seat. The rest ran silently off and joined a group of berry-whackers.

The garden was a level square of ground which lay protected by the high embankment and the masses of unkempt vegetation
along its side; the light wind that stirred the tops of the trees did not at the moment reach it. Tables were here and there, and canvas deck chairs to loll in. The place was deserted save for Kenzie, sitting in a far corner near the tea-house, having an animated discussion with a waiter in a white jacket, who crouched beside his chair. He had seen them come into the garden, but he affected not to be aware of their presence until they had arrived at his very feet. Then he glanced up and smiled casually, as if he had just left them only five minutes earlier. The waiter pulled up chairs for them and disappeared into the tea-house, from which now issued the scratching and clicking that in an Arab café marks the beginning of a phonograph record.
“Bilèche tabousni fi aynayah?”
complained Abd el Wahab in an enormous, dusty voice. “Why do you kiss me on my eyelids?”

“I’ve got a guest coming,” Kenzie said suddenly.

CHAPTER 16

Kenzie had been sitting with no glass in front of him, and he appeared to have no intention of ordering anything, either for himself or for those who had just joined him. Stenham knew that Moss had observed this, and he was waiting to see what he proposed to do about it; he himself never drank, nevertheless he would have liked a glass of mint tea to wash down the dust he felt he had swallowed during the climb up through the Medina. But he was determined not to do the suggesting or the ordering: he did not intend to have the drinks charged to him. For one thing, he was living on a strict budget at the moment, hoping to make the advance on his present book last until he had completed it. And then, he felt that he, as the only American present, ought
not to be expected to pay for everyone’s drinks. Besides this, he had noticed on similar occasions during the past fortnight a certain sparring between Moss and Kenzie, as if each one had decided that the other should be forced to disburse a little more than his share; neither one ever seemed to have any small change on hand. Kenzie had confided to him that if he and Moss took a carriage together from Bou Jeloud to the Ville Nouvelle in the afternoon, Moss always rushed forward to pay, so that Kenzie would have to pay the return trip. “Well,” Stenham had said, “why not?” “Because at six o’clock the tariff goes up,” Kenzie had explained, with perfect seriousness. Now he felt that the situation might actually come to a head, if he merely sat still and waited. All that seemed destined to happen, however, was a mutual offering and refusing of cigarettes, with each man settling back to smoke one of his own brand.

“She’s staying here at the Zitoun,” Kenzie said presently, continuing the conversation of a moment ago.

“Curious,” Moss observed, breathing out a thick cloud of smoke which he watched a second before going on. “An American staying here. You wouldn’t expect it to be comfortable enough for her.”

Stenham held his tongue, certain that Moss was trying to bait him.

“She’s rather a good sort, and not at all stupid,” Kenzie went on. “Yesterday I found her sitting all alone here in the garden reading. We got to talking, and I told her you were here”—he looked at Stenham—”and she’s heard of you. I thought it might be fun if the only four English-speaking people in Fez had a grand reunion.”

“Don’t forget the missionaries and the Consul and his wife,” advised Stenham.

“But I said people.” Kenzie was an avowed enemy of the British Consul: there had been unpleasantness over the mislaying of a pile of mail. Stenham and Moss were well informed on the subject.

“I rather wish you’d told me she was going to eat with us,” Moss said; he sounded aggrieved. “And the reason is”—he raised
his voice—”that I’m jolly hungry and I’d have eaten more breakfast if I’d known. Where is she?”

“She’ll be along in a minute,” Kenzie assured him.

“Incidentally,” said Stenham, “you’ll find a new addition to the collection of graffiti on your car when you go out. The word ‘Mohammed’ nicely written in indelible ink on the hood, just behind the strut. I caught him in the act.”

“I hope you gave him a good buffeting,” said Kenzie.

“Well, no, as a matter of fact, I didn’t.”

“A good clout on the head works wonders. They don’t forget it.”

“Maybe,” said Stenham, “but then another one comes along who hasn’t had the benefit of a clout. You can’t discipline the whole country.”

“Still,” Moss said dreamily, “that’s what must be done before they can ever accomplish anything.”

Stenham bridled. “What d’you want them to accomplish? You sound like a leader of the Istiqlal. Why have they got to accomplish something? Can’t they just be let alone and go on as they are?”

Moss smiled. “No, my dear fellow. You know very well they can’t.”

Stenham looked around the garden and thought: It’s too nice a place to spoil with an argument. To Moss he said pleasantly: “My question was rhetorical. You’re worse than my wife. She always thought everything needed an answer.”

Moss cleared his throat and signaled the waiter, who had come out of the tea-house and was pulling dead leaves from one of the vines that covered its sides.

“A bottle of Sidi Brahim rosé, and set the table, please, and bring a big bowl of ice to cool the wine in. We’ll have the
bastela
first. How is it today?”

“Magnifique, monsieur
,” said the waiter gravely.

“Magnifique
, eh?” Moss echoed, amused.

The waiter hurried off. Stenham glanced at Kenzie, to see how he was taking Moss’s petulance. Kenzie smoked blandly. A stork sailed slowly past overhead, not moving its wings, but balanced,
soaring on some invisible air-current. From the loudspeaker in the tea-house came the enigmatic phrases of a Chleuh dance: rasping
rebab,
excitable
guinbri,
high childish voices making their long, throaty mountain calls above the hopping accompaniment.

Moss was really very pro-French, Stenham was thinking. Like them, he refused to consider the Moroccans’ present culture, however decadent, an established fact, an existing thing. Instead, he seemed to believe that it was something accidentally left over from bygone centuries, now in a necessary state of transition, that the people needed temporary guidance in order to progress to some better condition, “So that,” Stenham had bitterly remarked, “they can stop being Moroccans.” For the French had basically the same idea as the Nationalists; they quarreled only over externals, and even there he was beginning to wonder if these supposed disagreements were not part of a gigantic Machiavellian act, put on under the combined auspices of the French and Moroccan Communists in governmental positions, who, knowing better than anyone that before there can be change there must be discontent, were willing to drag the country to the verge of civil war in the process of manufacturing that discontent. The methods and aims of the Istiqlal were fundamentally identical with those of Marxism-Leninism; that much had been made abundantly clear to him by reading their publications and talking with members and friends of the organization. But wasn’t it possible that any movement toward autonomy in a colonial country, especially one where feudalism had remained intact, must almost inevitably take that road?