My Happy Days In Hell
Page 17
According to our custom, Amar and I went to sleep on the roof of the kashba, lying on a mat and covering ourselves with a light blanket. Amar fell asleep as soon as his head touched the mat. It seemed to me as if his head were resting not on the mat but on his long, dark-blue, resilient hair. I sat up quietly and looked round me in the bright moonlight, down into the valley where the greenish-blue shades of the oasis shone like the beryls, amethysts and lapis-lazuli in Theodora’s crown, further to the east where the outlines of the mountains glowed rusty-brown in the distance. I felt a deep contentment, the kind of contentment Joseph must have felt after he had learned to like Potiphar’s house and before the woman had begun to pester him with her love, as he lay at night on the roof of the palace in Thebes remembering how miserable he had been at the bottom of the well and how beautiful were the poems sung here in Africa.
In the course of the past week I had felt at home here, not at all like a guest. But would it be the same if I remained for ever? My conscience did not protest against accepting help from Ujvary but my relationship to Amar was much more delicate. I looked down upon the sleeper; moonbeams were playing chess on his face and in the black and white death-mask only the temples shone blue, like lakes in a map. The blanket had slipped down to his waist. The network of his muscles lay relexed and his nipples were like two fresh, red seals on a scroll of parchment. I looked at his ribs then closed my eyes, feeling as if, in a dream, I had sneaked along a golden-brown fence. We had been living side by side for a week, for a week we had talked from morning till night and sometimes through the night. More than once our thoughts had been frighteningly alike. He often guessed what was going on in my mind and divined my wishes long before I realized them myself. Yet, after all this time, I knew almost nothing about Amar.
Early in the morning we set out towards the bed of the Draa on mule-back, and from there to Agadir. After a good lunch at the hotel Amar asked me to accompany him to a Marabou. We walked for a few miles between sand-dunes until, down below; we sighted the scintillating, pale blue sheet-glass of the sea. Amar explained to me that a Marabou was a seer, a wise old man, but at the same time the word also meant the square, cupola-roofed white building in which the sorcerer lived. I should have liked to find out the purpose of our visit but as I knew that a direct question was impolite, I asked Amar whether he believed in the power of the sorcerer. Instead of replying he treated me to a lecture. He said that the Mohammedan religion was even more rational than the Protestant and that, therefore, he didn’t believe a word of it. He observed the religious rules merely because he was obliged to do so unless he wished his neighbours to put fire to his house, not to speak of the circumstance that he was living in a theocratic state in which, even had he wanted to, he could buy himself neither ham nor wine. The mystics of Islam, who, by the way, had not been Arabs but Persians or newcomers from Andalusia, like Ibn al-Arabi, had been so disheartened by the rationalism of their religion that they went to the other extreme.
‘I was at a crossroads,’ he said, ‘like a European born in the days of St Bernard of Clairvaux and Pierre Abelard. On one side, infinite, mystical devotion; on the other, pure rationalism, accepting the existence of God only because it finds in the Bible a hundred and twenty-three proofs of his existence and only seventy-one of his non-existence. I chose neither of the extremes.
‘I believe I am a Platonist or, rather, a neo-Platonist. As we possess only astronomers, chemists, geologists and mathematicians who correspond, to a certain degree, to the Ionian philosophers, but no Socrates, no Plato, we can have no neo-Platonists to drive our theologians mad and bring upon us a wonderful hereticism like neo-Platonism did. Therefore, having no other choice, I am compelled to adhere to your Plato – or rather, to his disloyal disciples. But the sorcerer we are going to visit,’ he added, ‘has nothing to do with mysticism or neo-Platonism. He offers only practical advice.’
The Marabou was sitting on a small rug in the exact centre of a large and almost completely bare room, right under the cupola. He was a bony-faced, beturbaned, bearded old man. He nodded to Amar, laid his arms ceremoniously across his chest and gave me a fleeting glance from eyes brown, protruding and bright, like raisins soaked in water.
‘Hail, o Amar ben Achmed ben Othman ben Jusef ben Muhammed Abu Bekr as-Salahiyal!’ he uttered slowly and solemnly. ‘Hail, and peace be with you.’
Then with a crooked smile that revealed his slightly protruding but faultless, snow-white teeth, he continued conventionally and condescendingly:
‘I am glad to note that for the sake of a foreigner you have deserted the young boys of Morocco. The fez looks good on the stranger, his eyes are beautiful, his waist narrow as if a snake were rearing its body along the outline of his hips. But by the look of him I should say that he is at least as much of a rogue as yourself!’
He threw me a brief, sharp glance. I bent my head in shame.
‘Whenever I see you, Amar,’ the old man continued, ‘I am always reminded of a physical culture appliance I once saw at a school in Mogador. This school, too, was imposed upon us by the cursed French… It was a short, thin, iron rod with two iron spheres attached to its ends. It was called a dumb-bell. Your awe-inspiring appearance reminds me of that dumb-bell. Your backbone is the iron rod and the two sphere-shaped parts of your body at the two extremities of your backbone are the two spheres of the dumb-bell. I am not being improper: I mean those parts of your body without which you could neither think, nor sire children – assuming, for the sake of argument, that this were your intention. Allow me to greet in you one of nature’s miracles; contrary to all rules and laws your body swings towards the smaller sphere and is dominated by it. Perhaps because the smaller sphere is so compact and so heavy that it outweighs your head, and its virile juices prevail over the juices in your head for, as Ibn Sina said, our body is ruled by juices. Every time you come to me for advice, it is not your head that brings you here but the small spheres at the other extreme of your body. Let me hear your troubles, son, with the usual shamelessness for which I like you.’
I hoped that Amar would give the insolent old man a piece of his mind and leave. To my surprise he laughed and jested with him wittily and in filthy language. At long last he told the old man squarely that he wanted to get rid of his wife who was quarrelsome, boring and an absolute nuisance to him.
‘Go to the Cadi tomorrow and tear up your marriage certificate,’ the Marabou said lightly. ‘How many sheep did you give for her?’
Amar shook his head and explained that since his father’s death his mother held the purse-strings and his mother loved his wife. However strange this might sound, the two women were strongly allied against him. If he divorced his wife against his mother’s wishes, she might even disinherit him.
‘But why do I have to tell you all this?’ he exclaimed angrily. ‘You know it as well as I.’
‘Of course I know it,’ the old man said and raised his right hand almost imperceptibly from his lap.
Amar threw him a twenty-five-franc silver coin which he caught easily, then raised his hand again.
‘I shall give you excellent advice,’ he said almost entreatingly.
Amar threw him another twenty-five-franc piece. The Marabou closed his eyes and meditated. He was completely motionless, only his lips moved as if he were praying.
‘One of the lorry drivers of the Vulcan Garage in Dar el-Beida,’ he murmured monotonously as if he were an oracle obeying a higher command without understanding it, ‘loves his profession so much that he loves only money more. He answers to the name of Larbi. Look for this young man at the garage, Show him your wife in the street. Show her to him repeatedly until he would know her among all the women of Dar el-Beida, even in a crowd. Show her to him until he would know her from behind among all the women of Maghreb. Offer this Larbi first two thousand francs, then come to terms at four thousand. Warn him that the most he would get for the accident would be eight months – after all, she is only a woman – but if he confes
sed why he did it, then they would hang him.
‘On the road to Derb Sidna the French have not yet built a pavement. Let Larbi run over your wife in the early morning, when she is on her way to the market, because there isn’t much traffic on the road then. Let him run her over from behind. Include this in your verbal agreement, tell him that you won’t pay if he runs her over in any other way. When a woman sees a lorry approaching she begins to jump back and forth like a hen; she may lose an arm or a leg and keep you tied to her for the next fifty years.
‘Until the unfortunate accident takes place be kind to your wife and put up with her moods without a murmur. If she reproaches you for running around with boys, promise that you will mend your ways, and, violating your nature, take her then and there. Let Allah lend you the strength for this undertaking and be comforted by the knowledge that you will never have to do it again. In this way everyone will be sorry for you for having lost your young wife at the peak of your married happiness. And send Larbi, when he is in prison, a few good dinners. Not too many, or he will think you are afraid of him and will begin to blackmail you. Send him his dinner once a week, every Friday, to show that you have not forgotten him. Let the inhabitants of the town praise you for your generosity in forgiving your wife’s murderer.
‘But the hour of prayer is approaching,’ he said in his ordinary voice. He motioned to us to go and in this movement there was disdain. Not moral indignation, just disdain.
We hurried down to the sea-shore to bathe. I was utterly downcast. While we were standing before the Marabou, the brutality and vulgarity of the scene had surprised me but at the same time I had found it rather amusing, but as soon as we stepped out of the house, I felt the full weight of humiliation descending upon me. How different had been our return to the Middle Ages last night, when we sat listening to the minstrels! The shocking, disquieting and yet so attractive duality of Amar’s character, which enabled him to carry on this vile and filthy conversation with the dirty old man after his lecture on neo-Platonism, left me dumbfounded. I blamed myself, too, for this visit. I was Amar’s partner in crime and was not in a moral position to give vent to my indignation and disgust. Yet I could not keep silent, either. I decided that I would try to convince Amar by argument.
‘Do you want to know that I think?’ I asked him when we reached the sea-shore and began to undress.
‘Of course,’ he replied absent-mindedly, kicking off his slippers. ‘I know what is coming,’ he added with a sigh. When he had stripped off all his clothes he sat down next to me in the sand and stretched out his legs. An incoming wave drenched his foot and ankle and, as a gift of the sea, placed a shell beside him.
I explained that the only way one could commit murder was the way used by one of Gide’s heroes, who pushed an unknown man out of the window of a train simply because he did not like the stranger’s face. Only an action gratuite remains without consequences, both in the field of penal law and of psychology. Having read Crime and Punishment he must know that an intellectual cannot kill even a disgusting, useless old miser with premeditation without becoming in some way crippled. You must not kill is not only a social convention, a religious rule and one of the paragraphs of the penal code: it is a law inherent in man’s being. The observation of the law involves practical benefits, its violation is ruinous even if the authorities fail to discover the murder.
‘Why? A woman has no soul. Mohammed said so!’
‘Why are you referring to Mohammed? Didn’t you say yourself that you didn’t believe a word of it?’
‘We are talking about moral norms and not about what I do or do not believe. Bouthayna can neither read nor write, there is no intellectual relationship between us. This is something you cannot grasp because your women are educated. When embracing an illiterate woman I feel as if I were committing sodomy: What is sodomy, if not this?’
‘Sodomy is a lesser crime than murder.’
‘Let’s bathe,’ Amar suggested.’
When we were in the sea to our knees he turned to me.
‘There is only one thing I should like to know. To what extent do you reject me because of the Marabou and everything I have said to you? I don’t mind your logical protests. But I should like to know how much you rebel against me in your emotions?’
I considered for a moment.
‘Not at all,’ I confessed at last.
We remained on the beach until late in the evening. When we walked back to Agadir Amar promised, though not very convincingly, that he would postpone his plans and not contact the lorry driver for the time being.
The subtropical summer fled with vertiginous speed. I spent the mornings at the huge swimming pool on the sea-shore. I lay on my stomach on the stone wall dividing the sweet water from the sea and watched the sun flying in a wide arc above my head or the sea which was greyer and more monotonous that I expected it to be. My thoughts dwelt on the tragedy of Europe, the miseries of emigration and the uncertainty of the future. But in the afternoons, when, clad in a djellaba, I sat with Amar on the mats in Arab cafés, or we lay in the hot water under the cupola of the Turkish bath like two boiled fish, I forgot everything and abandoned myself completely to my new, picaresque and happy life. I felt as if I had rid myself of my old habits and ideas acquired by mere chance of birth on the European jumble-market, the way I threw off my clothes in the dressing-room of the Turkish bath, and, that at last I had found my real self.
The sunset reminded me of the colours and consistency of the Turkish delight which I had loved as a child and had often bought from the merchant near the entrance to the school. At that hour Amar and I used to go down to the sea, to the red rocks overgrown with bougainvillaea where we came face to face with the fresh breeze while, from the direction of the town, we were pursued by the smell of burnt oil, mutton and fermenting fruit. At night we used to sit in the palm-grove by the sea, as though in some domed cellar above which the huge cylinder-mill of the moon scattered its sparkling flour so that it rained down slowly, soundlessly, between the black feather-dusters of the palms. At other times I would wander alone at night in another part of the town, over bare, red, granite-hard ground dotted with lipless wells. I would sit down to rest under the date-palms whose still unripened fruit rattled in the breeze, and, before going home to sleep, would drink a glass of champagne in one of the cafés. I was not at all bothered by my parasitic way of life: the authorities forbade Europeans to take employment – this remained the only privilege of the Arabs – and Ujvary, who gave us uncounted sums of money, had repeatedly said that he wasn’t giving it for bread alone.
When the Italian armistice commission arrived and it was rumoured that it would soon be followed by the Gestapo, Amar invited me to his kashba for the ‘next seven times seven years’. He told me to throw my expired Hungarian passport into the sea, he would obtain an identification paper for me in an Arab name, a name I could choose myself. He made me a gift of a number of burnouses, djellabas, fezes and slippers and insisted that the whole thing was only a question of decision. Within five years I would forget my mother tongue and if I followed him, no news or messages or letters from Europe would ever find me again. I felt like agreeing to his proposal on the spot, but suspended my decision until I had considered all aspects of the problem. Bandi said that if the Gestapo arrived we couldn’t stay, with which I wholeheartedly agreed; then he added that it was our duty to volunteer for the British Army to fight against Hitler. Lorsy believed that we had nothing to fear from the Gestapo, because of our excellent connections, and said that it was a crime to leave a place where one lived so well without doing a stitch of work for it. Then he added that for the last hundred and forty years the British had prevented the political and economic unification of Europe, though only such a union could have thwarted Hitler’s ascent to power. He explained that the British were responsible for the equipping of Hitler’s army; that it was the British who had permitted Mussolini’s ships to pass through the Suez Canal when he attacked Ethiopia, that Ba
ldwin had stayed Blum’s hand when the latter wanted to come to the help of the Spanish Republic against Franco and that Chamberlain had sold Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich. He – he continued – felt a deep sympathy for the British people, but now the day had come when they had to eat what they had cooked. It would be ridiculous, he said, if we permitted ourselves to be fooled by the axiom that in case of war one should side with the less despicable of the two opponents, for the only thing we should do in case of war was to run from it.
After a long debate, in which I took Bandi’s part, Lorsy gave in and went to see the nearest British Consul at Tangier. He took with him our passports and those of a few other Hungarian refugees who desired to fight in the British Army. We had to entrust this mission to Lorsy, not only because of his gift for diplomacy and his knowledge of languages but also because his was the only passport still valid. Lorsy spent two weeks in Tangier. When he got back he gave us a detailed account of his experiences. The British Consul had thanked him warmly for our zeal but had declared that Great Britain had all the solders she needed. Lorsy related that for our sakes he had made friends with the American Consul too, and had several times lunched with him at the Roma, an excellent Italian restaurant, under Mussolini’s portrait, but in vain. The American Consul could promise us nothing. At that point the conversation degenerated into a quarrel, Bandi reproaching Lorsy for having dined at a fascist restaurant, and Lorsy declaring that this was the best restaurant in Tangier and his stomach had no political prejudices.