by Paul Bowles
Now that there was a stock of food in the house, so that although they might not eat particularly well, it was unlikely that they would go hungry even if the trouble became very bad, Amar should have been relieved and felt more or less at ease. Not at all—he had never been more nervous and restless. He wanted to go out and be everywhere in the town at once, but it was still raining a little, and in any case he had the feeling that no matter where he went the streets would be empty, and that the sounds of activity would be coming from some distant, unbeatable spot.
He tried playing his flute for a few minutes, but it made an unreasonably loud noise in the middle of this quiet morning, an absurd and sour sound that finally made him toss it up onto a shelf between the broken alarm clock and the colored picture of Ben Barek the soccer idol, in his red and blue uniform. Then he stepped out onto the roof and tried to see beyond the nearby housetops, but the fine drizzle that was falling obscured everything. However, the sky was brightening. He went back in and lay down. The air was hot and breathless. Today even the roosters of the neighborhood seemed to have agreed to observe the general silence. And with only four days to go before the Aïd, it was incredible that there should be no sign or sound of sheep on the terraces. Never before had such a strange thing happened; in other years you could hear the bleating coming from every direction during the ten or fifteen days before the feast. Some families bought their animals as much as a month ahead of time, to be able to fatten them properly for the sacrifice. This year—silence, which was why he had not realized that the day was so close. If his father had been alone downstairs, he would have taken the unusual step of going down and discussing it with him. But Mustapha was there, and it was, after all, an affair between his father and Mustapha, in which he had no part. When the old man died, it would be Mustapha who would attend to the buying and killing of the sheep, not Amar.
And now he began to wonder what the outdoor ceremony of the Aïd at Emsallah would be like, with the Berber soldiers spread out there just below. It was the most important event of the year, upon which the prosperity and well-being of the city depended. There were always at least a hundred thousand people there, swarming through the cemetery and ranged across the hillside above it, come to watch the khtib slit the throat of the sheep sent by the Sultan, and to see whether the runners, who operated in wonderfully organized shifts, would arrive opposite the Andaluz mosque with it while it still breathed. This was essential, for if the sheep had expired before they threw it down at the feet of the gzara, it was a very bad omen for the coming year. But with Bab Fteuh blocked by the soldiers, how were the runners going to get through? Allah was watching them, each one of them must exert himself to the utmost; if their teamwork were faulty in passing the sheep from one group of four to the next, if one of them fell, if the way were not completely cleared, the sheep might breathe its last while they were still on the way, and although the final group might arrive in the courtyard with each man holding one of its legs in the most perfect position, it would all be in vain, and the city would suffer the displeasure of Allah for the entire year to come, until the fault could be obliterated at the next Aïd el Kebir.
It was intolerable that the gate should be barred by the presence of all those soldiers; the French could only mean it as a provocation. “They want us to try and break through, so their Berbers will shoot,” he thought with sudden fury. Just as they had taken the Sultan away on the very day of the Aïd a year ago, to make sure that there could not possibly be any good fortune or happiness, so they were going to try and prevent the Moslems from finding favor with Allah again this year. The thought, once it had occurred to him, was too awful for him to keep it to himself. He bounded up from the mattress and ran down the two flights of stairs.
The family had finished tea, but they were still sitting just as before, save that his mother had moved onto the small mattress beside Halima. Her face was pink with weeping, and she looked scarcely older than the girl. Si Driss had married her when she was thirteen; she still had the flesh and force of a young woman. Amar looked at her now as he came into the room, saw the traces of tears on her face, knew that she had shed them for him because it hurt her to think of his becoming other than the way he was (even if were only a bone in his nose that had changed its shape) and felt a terrible urge to take her in his arms, kiss her cheeks and eyes. He sat down quietly, letting his arms hang at his sides. What he had it in his mind to say retreated from him for a short moment. When the awareness came that he and his mother had in some strange manner become the two focal points of attention on the part of the others, he forced himself out of his brief stupor, turned to his father, who was watching him with an uncomprehending expression on his face, and said: “What’s going to happen at Bab Fteuh?”
“Who can know? With those devils there—”
“How are they going to get the sheep through?”
His father looked surprised. “There’s not going to be any sheep. Don’t you know that?”
Amar stared at him wildly. “But there has to be.”
“There has to be, yes, but there’s not going to be. It’s the end of Islam, all this. Just as it was written. By the Moslems’ own will.”
Amar was aghast. “The Moslems’!” he cried. “The Moslems’ own will!”
“Of course. Who forbade us to buy sheep, threatened to kill us if we did? The Wattanine. The friends of Si Allal, the Istiqlal, whatever you want to call them. Who goes snooping around to be sure nobody has a sheep on his roof? The boys from the Karouine with their schoolbooks under their arm, the friends of freedom. Who beats and stabs the people trying to carry out Allah’s commandments? The same boys. Why? They say the khtib can’t accept a sheep from Arafa because he is a French Sultan. They say there must be no rejoicing until Mohammed ben Youssef comes back.”
“Arafa’s not our Sultan,” said Amar hesitantly.
“And was Si Mohammed?” asked his father, his eyes bright with excitement. During the Sultan’s quarter of a century on the throne, Si Driss had never allowed a portrait of him to be hung in the house. Now that it was a prison offense to possess such portraits, although there were countless thousands of them hidden in the Medina, he felt somehow doubly righteous. “Remember Hakim Filala.” And he proceeded to quote the saying that had been popular among malcontents ever since the beginning of the Alaoui dynasty three centuries back. “ ‘The reign of the Filala: it’s not costly but it’s not cheap. It’s not noisy but it’s not quiet. You have a king but you have no king. That’s the reign of the Filala.’ And that’s the truth. Who let the carrion French into Morocco in the first place? A Filali. Don’t ever forget that when you’re listening to your friends tell you about the Sultan, the Sultan, the Sultan….”
Amar knew all this perfectly, but to him it seemed a most inopportune moment to go over it. His father was really getting old. “But the soldiers at Bab Fteuh,” he began. That at least was a hostile act which had clearly been instigated by the French.
“Use your head,” said the old man. “The friends of freedom don’t want the festival, and they’ll stop it anyway, all by themselves. Don’t you think the French know that? But the French can’t afford to let them stop it. Then everyone would know how strong the Istiqlal is. If someone is going to do something, the French have got to be the ones to do it. They want just what the Istiqlal wants, but they want the credit. They have to make it look as though they were the ones who did it. They’re all working together against us. In five years the children of Fez will be saying: ‘Aïd el Kebir? What’s the Aïd el Kebir?’ No one will remember it. This is the end of Islam. Bismil’lah rahman ex rahim.” He sat, staring vacantly ahead of him for a moment. No one spoke. “The fault is all our own,” he went on presently. “Because Satan stands next to you, you don’t make him your friend. There is sin everywhere now.” Si Driss shook his head sadly, but his glittering black eyes looked dangerous.
Listening, Amar could not help hearing again the potter’s words of only a few sho
rt hours ago: “Sins are finished.” In some hideous, perverse fashion the two statements coincided. If there were no sins, then everything was necessarily a sin, which was what his father meant by the end of Islam. He felt the imperative and desperate need for action, but there was no action which could possibly lead to victory, because this was a time of defeat. Then the important thing was to see that you did not go down to defeat alone—the Jews and the Nazarenes must go, too. The circle was closed; now he understood the Wattanine whom the French called les terroristes and les assassins. He understood why they were willing to risk dying in order to derail a train or burn a cinema or blow up a post office. It was not independence they wanted, it was a satisfaction much more immediate than that: the pleasure of seeing others undergo the humiliation of suffering and dying, and the knowledge that they had at least the small amount of power necessary to bring about that humiliation. If you could not have freedom you could still have vengeance, and that was all anyone really wanted now. Perhaps, he thought, rationalizing, trying to connect the scattered fragments of reality with his image of truth, vengeance was what Allah wished His people to have, and by inflicting punishment on unbelievers the Moslems would merely be imposing divine justice.
“Ed dounia ouahira,” he sighed. “The world is a difficult place.” He looked out into the courtyard: the drizzle had ceased entirely, and the sun was beginning to break through the mist. He decided to go out, but at the very moment he was making the decision his mother spoke.
“You mustn’t go out again today. This is a bad day.”
Amar turned hopefully to his father. “Let him go,” the old man said. “He’s not a woman. Tomorrow will be worse.”
“I’m afraid,” she complained. Amar smiled.
CHAPTER 13
In the street he walked along looking at the mud that oozed up around his toes at each step; the covered stretches were dry, and there the dust lay thick on the ground. Wherever there was a pile of fish heads or some donkey manure, the flies were innumerable; they rose in black swarms and settled again quickly. What good was it to have the baraka, he was thinking, and to be different from everyone else, if you could do nothing for your people? Something terrible was going to happen—of that he was convinced—yet it was of no help to know it. The tautness that had been going on for so long was at last going to break, the blood was ready to come out and spill on the ground. And no one wanted to prevent it; on the contrary, the people were eager to see it, even if it was to be their own blood.
Each shop-front along the way was boarded up and padlocked. The narrow alleys seemed hotter for being deserted. Occasionally a man passed, walking quickly, the rustling of his garments audible in the silence. “As though it were late at night,” Amar thought. He stood still suddenly. The long empty vista of the Souk Attarine, with its pale sunlight filtered into thousands of small squares by the latticework overhead, looked like a dried river bed stretching off into the dusty distance. The strong smell of all the spices was there as always, but the small squares of sunlight that should have been moving up and down hundreds of djellabas and haiks, as their wearers wandered beneath the trellises, lay flat on the ground in still, regular patterns.
From the street of the lawyers’ booths at his left came the long mechanical whine of a beggar. Again and again he heard the sound, repeating exactly the same words in exactly the same way. “Poor man,” Amar said to himself. “He’ll starve today.” He started to walk again, more deliberately, as though he were beginning to derive a small amount of pleasure from it. The street bore to the left, became very narrow, and opened upon a tiny square lined with shops where the students of the Karouine bought their textbooks. The beggar’s voice was still clearly audible. He turned back and down the alley where he knew the man would be sitting. He found him further along than he had expected, squatting with his back against the wall, a crude staff in one hand, his face with its two purplish eyeless sockets raised toward the absent multitude, chanting his endless song. He was a young man with a full, pointed black beard and very white teeth. Amar stopped walking and stood watching him for a moment. Someone had given him a fairly new djellaba, but beneath it, around his legs, nameless rags emerged, and his turban was yellow with dust. In the direction from which Amar had just come, above the man’s sharp litany, he now heard the confused sound of voices and cries. As he debated whether to go toward them or away from them, he realized that they were approaching rapidly, and that mixed with the shouts were other less usual noises, the indefinite scufflings that accompany a struggle. For a moment he considered stepping over to the beggar, seizing his turban, putting it on his own head so that it would cover part of his face, and sitting down beside the man. But then it occurred to him that the beggar, being blind, might not understand quickly enough, in which case he could still be demanding an explanation as the others came into view. Instead, he turned and rapidly scaled the façade of the stall behind him, using the iron bolts as rungs for his bare feet. It took a big effort to hoist himself to the roof, because there was nothing to grasp at the top, but he made it, and silently. Up here, and on the other formless roofs of the shops in the alley, everything was a jumble of packing cases, broken iron bedsteads, waste paper and rags. A gaunt cat stared at him malevolently from atop a roll of rotten matting a few roofs away. Carefully he lay face downward, his head behind a battered washtub, and peered around its crooked edge, up the alley.
Soon they came into view, surrounded by a cloud of dust. About twenty young men were walking with comparative swiftness in a tight group; in their midst, struggling to break through to the outside, and being propelled ahead with the aid of shoves and blows, were two powerfully built mokhaznia, their navy blue uniforms hanging from them in strips, so that parts of their bare chests and shoulders showed through. As they heaved themselves desperately against the living wall that imprisoned them, strange sounds like sobs came from their mouths, and their eyes rolled back and forth in their heads like the eyes of madmen. Their faces and necks ran with blood from the blows they had received. In fact, everyone was spattered with it, the captors scarcely less than their prisoners. The dust that was in the air around them they had raised a few paces back, where the alley was covered; now they slid clumsily in the mud. If one of the men began to fall, he was kicked into an upright position by a dozen feet around him. From the corner of his eye Amar saw the cat flatten itself to the roof and, sliding away like a serpent, disappear.
Above the chaos the beggar’s voice continued its hopeful chant, louder than before. He must be crazy, Amar thought, not to realize what was going on right in front of him. But now, when they were directly below him, so that Amar could have spit into their midst, there came the sound of shouts and police whistles from the brighter end of the alley, toward Ras Cherratine. It was as if an electric shock had passed through all of them at the same instant. Everything happened with lightning speed. The two mokhaznia made two final, superlative lunges in opposite directions. The circle gave momentarily; several of the young men lost their balance. Amar felt the impact of their bodies against the wall below him. But at the same time the knives briefly mirrored pieces of the sky; those left standing closed in. One mokhazni screamed: “Ahhh!” and the other fell soundlessly. The young men stumbled over each other as they fled back the way they had come. Amar saw the faces of some of them as they panted their final curses above the two figures lying on the ground. They too looked like madmen, he thought, but he had a powerful and senseless desire to be one of them, to know what they had experienced as they had felt the blades of their knives going inside the enemy’s flesh.
Now they were gone, and the beggar was still singing, like some insect in a summer field; if he had moved his right leg forward he would have kicked the head of one of the mokhaznia. But he did not move; his face remained tilted upward at the same angle, and his mouth continued to move, forming the holy words. The French would be there in a minute, and they would doubtless drag the poor blind man off to jail as a witness; t
hey were capable of such incredible stupidity.
Amar had raised his head now, and was rapidly examining the topography of the rooftops. It would not be good to be caught up here, but if he jumped down into the alley it was likely that he would fail to get to either end of it before the police arrived. He scrambled to his feet, and carefully stepping over the objects whose contact would give off sound, made his way along the string of roofs until he came to the wall of a higher building. A ledge built the length of this led back from the alley and became a narrow wall dividing two courtyards. Feeling no dizziness and keeping his eyes fixed firmly on his feet, he moved along the top of the wall to its end, and hoisted himself onto another roof there. Looking backward for an instant, he saw that an old woman in the courtyard immediately below was watching his progress with interest. That was bad. “Look the other way, grandmother,” he said, glancing about the clean-swept surface of the cube-like structure on which he stood. There must be a street somewhere near by.
The old woman’s voice came up from below: “May Allah bless you.” Or had she said: “May Allah burn you?” He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike. At the edge he peered down; there was another wide roof considerably lower than the one where he was at the moment. Further down at the side he saw a marble-paved court, with a small orange tree in each corner, but the angle was such that he could not tell whether or not the street lay beyond. If he jumped down onto the roof it would make a noise; he would have to continue quickly, and it was too far to climb back up to where he stood now. Even had there been no trouble in the city, for him to be caught on the roofs would have meant being taken to jail: the roofs were for the women. A man climbing from terrace to terrace could be only one of two things: a thief or an adulterer. Today of course it was worse. They would simply shoot at him. He said a short prayer, let himself hang down as far as he could, and dropped the rest of the way. If there were people inside the building, they had certainly heard the noise he made when he hit. He ran to the other end of the roof, saw the empty street below, and dropped again, landing very hard with his bare feet flat in the mud. It was a small complicated alley with a great many dead ends where there were merely doors on all sides, and he had to follow several false leads until he had found the exit passage, a little wider than the others, which, after rounding three corners, at last led out into another alley that in turn gave on a through street. Unless one knew a particular derb by heart, one could always be fooled. He had come out into the basket souk, but how strange it looked, completely boarded up and deserted! If only one among its several dozen shops had been open, it would still have been itself, but this way, only its distinctive shape, its steeply sloping floor and the hundreds of bunches of tiny green grapes that hung from its lattices above made it recognizable.