The Spider's House by Paul Bowles

the mountains or the city, and he continued to munch on his dates and bread, looking out over the water, around at the small cactus-studded hills that ringed the lake basin, and occasionally up at the sky, where at one point a hawk came sailing into the range of his vision, plunged, glided, and moved off behind the high curved horizon.
    “Where are you working now?” asked Mohammed. Amar told him. “How much?” Amar cut the true figure in half. “How is it? Good maallem?” Amar shrugged. The shrug and the grimace that went with it meant: Is anything good now? and the other understood and agreed. Mohammed, Amar knew, worked onand off in one or another of his father’s shops. He settled back; his position on the rock was comfortable, and all he wanted was to recline there for a few minutes in the sun and enjoy the feeling of having eaten. But Mohammed was fidgety and kept shifting around and talking; Amar found himself wishing that he had come alone.
    “Another big fire near Ras el Ma last night,” said Mohammed. “Eighteen hectares.”
    “When the summer’s over, there won’t be any wheat left in Morocco,” Amar remarked.
    “Hope not.”
    “What’ll we do for bread next winter?”
    “There won’t be any,” said Mohammed flatly.
    “And what’ll we eat?”
    “Leave that to the French. They’ll send wheat from France.”
    Amar was not so sure. “Maybe,” he said.
    “Better if they don’t. The trouble will start sooner if people are hungry.”
    It was easy for Mohammed to talk that way, because he was reasonably certain that he himself would not ever be in need of food. His father was a merchant, and probably had enough flour and oil and chickpeas stored in the house to last for two years if the need should arise. The middle-class and wealthy Fassi always had enormous private provisions to draw on in the event of emergency. To be able to weather a siege was part of the city’s tradition; there had been several such situations even since the French occupation.
    “Is that what the Istiqlal says?” Amar asked.
    “What?” Mohammed was staring across at the country boy, who had finished his laundering and now was squatting naked atop a large rock, waiting for the garments to dry.
    “That people should be hungry?”
    “You can see that yourself, can’t you? If people are living the same as always, with their bellies full of food, they’ll just go on the same way. If they get hungry and unhappy enough, something happens.”
    “But who wants to be hungry and unhappy?” said Amar.

    “Are you crazy?” Mohammed demanded. “Or don’t you want to see the French get out?”
    Amar had not intended to get caught this way on the wrong side of the conversation. “May the dogs burn in Hell,” he said. That was one of the troubles with the Istiqlal, with all politics: you talked about people as though they were not really people, as though they were only things, numbers, animals, perhaps, but not really people.
    “Have you been in the Zekak er Roumane this week?” Mohammed asked.
    “No.”
    “When you go through, look up at the roofs. Some of the houses there have tons of rocks. A yayay ! You can see them. They have them piled so they look like walls, but they’re all loose, ready to throw.”
    Amar felt his heart beat faster. ‘ Ouallah?”
    “Go and look,” said Mohammed.
    Amar was silent a moment. Then he said: “Something big’s going to happen, right?”
    “ B’d draa. It’s got to,” Mohammed said casually.
    Suddenly Amar remembered something he had been told about the Lalami family. Mohammed’s father, having discovered that Mohammed’s elder brother was a member of the Istiqlal, had put him out of the house, and the brother had gone off to Casablanca and been caught by the police. He was now in prison, awaiting trial along with some twenty other youths who had been apprehended at the same time for their activity in terrorist work, particularly in smuggling crates of hand grenades