Free The Spider's House by Paul Bowles Page B

isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation, and it had always been there with them and in them, as intangible and as real as the night around them. Amar pulled two loose cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to the potter. “Ah, the Moslems, the Moslems!” he sighed. “Who knows what’s going to happen to them?”
    “Who knows?” said the man, lighting the cigarette. When the qaouaji brought their tea they drank it without speaking, slowly.

    The breeze blew harder, bringing with it the chill odors of the higher air on the mountains. It was not until after they had separated in the street that Amar realized he had forgotten to ask the man for his money. He shrugged his shoulders and went home to dinner.

CHAPTER 5
    The young spring grew, wheeled along toward summer, bringing drier nights, a higher sun and longer days. And along with the numberless infinitesimal natural things that announced the slow seasonal change, there was another thing, quite as impalpable and just as perceptible. Perhaps if Amar had not been made aware of it by the potter, he could have continued for a while not suspecting its presence, but now he wondered how it had been possible for him to go on as long as he had without noticing it. One might have said that it hung in the air with the particles of dust, and settled with them into the pores of the walls, so completely was it a part of the light and atmosphere of the great town lying sprawled there between its hills. But it expressed itself in the startled look over the shoulder that followed the tap on the back, in the silence that fell over a café when an unfamiliar figure appeared and sat down, in the anguished glances that darted from one pair of eyes to another when the family, squatting around the evening tajine , ceased chewing at the sound of a knock on the door. People went out less; at night the twisting lanes of the Medina were empty, and Friday afternoons, when there should have been many thousands of people, all in their best clothing, in the Djenane es Sebir—the men walking hand in hand or in noisy groups among the fountains and across the bridges between the islands, the women sitting in tiers on the steps or on the benches in their own reserved bamboo grove—there were only a few unkempt kif-smokers who sat staring vacantly in front of themwhile urchins scuffed up the dust as they kicked around an improvised football made of rags and string.
    It was strange to see the city slowly withering, like some doomed plant. Each day it seemed that the process could go no further, that the point of extreme withdrawal from normal life had been reached, that an opening-up would now begin; but each new day people realized with a kind of awe that no such point was in sight.
    They wanted their own Sultan back—that went without saying—and in general they had faith in the political party that had pledged to bring about his return. Also, a certain amount of intrigue and secrecy had never frightened them; the people of Fez were well known to be the most devious and clever Moslems in Morocco. But scheming in their own traditional fashion was one thing, and being caught between the diabolical French colonial secret police and the pitiless Istiqlal was another. They were not used to living in an ambiance of suspicion and fear quite so intense as the state of affairs their politicians were now asking them to accept as an everyday condition.
    Slowly life was assuming a monstrous texture. Nothing was necessarily what it seemed; everything had become suspect—particularly that which was pleasant. If a man smiled, beware of him because he was surely a chkam , an informer for the French. If he plucked on an oud as he walked