"Ali and I live in Paris," my sister pointed out, in her calm voice. "Ali was born in Paris," said my mother, irritably. "Mohamed was born in Blida, and he was raised by my late lamented father, and he grew up in Saint-Ouen, in this apartment. His life, his real life, has always been by his mother's side. And if he followed our customs to the letter, because he is the eldest, even if he were married he would stay by my side. Butit is Mahmoud, may Allah protect him, who has sacrificed himself so that he may find his family under his poor mother's roof."
"Provided Mohamed makes up his mind to get married," grumbled my brother in Arabic. "Inshallah," I murmured. "It is the duty of every good Muslim to procreate as quickly as possible," said my brother in French, in his professorial tone. "Inshallah," I repeated. "Not inshallah. Right away!" shouted my brother abruptly, no longer quite so high and mighty. Then, going back and forth between the two languages: "You have turned down every single girl our mother has found for you. Even the mayor's daughter does not seem to meet with your approval. Our poor mother finally agreed to let you find a suitable one yourself. And she is waiting. We are waiting. You have to decide, and you have to hurry up, old boy. No one in this house is here only to be at your disposal."
"You are under no obligation to wait for me," I said calmly. "You would have your young brother get married before youdo?" asked my mother, indignantly. "Mektoub, mother …"
"Mektoub, you want everyone in Blida to talk?" she shouted in Arabic. "You want all of Saint-Ouen to go saying there's something wrong with my son?" she concluded with a sob. "You're imagining things, mother dear. People have other things to think about than to—" Her eyes rolled upward and, her throat tight, she interrupted, "And you just do exactly as you like."
"You should thank the Creator that he made you a boy," hissed my brother. Then, in his professorial tone, "Do you know what the Prophet, peace be upon him, said about parents?" Iheld my tongue and fumed with annoyance. I was the eldest, after all, I did not have to submit to my younger brother's whimsical changes of tone, nor to his explicit demands, I thought, while he blushed and grew nervous in the face of my silence. "Of course you know," he said eventually. "But I will remind you all the same. He said, peace be upon him, Unconditional obedience of one's parents. And regarding the issue of who, between the mother and the father, one must obey first, He not only replied, peace be upon him, Your mother, your mother, your mother, then your father, he added, Ajanatou tahta aqdami el-oumahate. Believers. It goes without saying." Then for the benefit of the neophyte, pontificating, he translated: "Paradise lies at the feet of your mothers … Literally, my brother …" Radiant, my mother nodded approvingly at my brother's words, and the radio announced the imminence of the Dhuhr prayer. My brother got up and turned up the volume. After murmuring a La-ilah-ila-allah-Mohammed-rasul-allah full of emphasis, his voice more professorial than ever, certain that I would refuse to accompany them to the mosque, he turned to my brother-in-law: "Come, Ali, my brother, let us do our duty. May God in his mercifulness accept our prayers and forgive our sins. Inshallah."
"Inshallah," echoed Alain also known as Ali. The two men then evoked the great blessing, one out loud, the other in a murmur, to which blessing we were still responding in unison when the front door slammed shut.
My mother, he said, or the voice in my right ear, I'm not sure which, then whispered to me, "It will be your fault if your brother doesn't become a father until he's retired."
As if to flee the discussion, my sister hastily cleared the table. "Go first to fulfill your duty to the Creator, my child," said my mother. "The dishes can wait."
"I am indisposed, mother," murmured my sister as she took away the last glass of tea. "You're not pregnant yet, my child?" said my mother. Fed on Judeo-Christian taboos, with a poor knowledge of Arabic, and consequently unused to the sauciness of the sort of gossip that the women would exchange in the baths and courtyards of Blida, my sister blushed right to her ears and said, "Oh, mother, it's hardly been six weeks …"
"So? I was pregnant on the very first night," said my mother, not without a certain note of pride. "Yes, mother dear …"
"If I'd had to wait for six weeks, the twins would never have been born," she added, giving me a sidelong glance. "Yes, mother dear …" sighed my sister. "God will see to it," concluded my mother with a little pout of disappointment. "Inshallah," murmured my sister, before hurrying out of the room. Instead of getting up and unrolling her prayer mat, my mother merely sang a few praises to God and his Prophet. Then, as if getting her bearings, she fell silent. Which could only mean she was making ready for a stormy discussion that would be endless and, above all, exhausting. I clenched my teeth and my mother moved her lips: "Why have you turned out so different from each other, you and Mahmoud?"
"We are still the same, my mother."
"How long has it been since you've been to the mosque?"
"Faith lives in people's hearts, my mother …"
"We hardly see you pray at home, either," she continued. "And your brother is suffering, he used to admire you so much, and swore by everything you knew. You were the first one to nurture him with the suras and the Hadith. What has become of you, my son? I no longer recognize you. Is it your studies which have distanced you from me and from your fine upbringing? Did I do something wrong by sending you to the best schools in the country? Will I have to pay for it for the rest of my days? Look at your brother-in-law, he too has degrees from a major school, but since he entered our religion he never misses a single prayer. Even on Fridays, when he has the time, he meets up with your brother at the Great Mosque. And you, Mohamed, my son, my favorite, to whom I gave the most noble of names, why are you behaving like a non-believer?"
"I am still the same, my mother …"
"Tabtab," she exclaimed, stirring the air with her hand, which meant she was not about to be taken for a fool. "I respect you, my mother …"
"By going to live like a kafir in Paris, my son?" she said, in Arabic. "I just want to be close to work …"
"And far away from your mother. You haven't forgotten why the Prophet, peace be upon him, evoked the mother three times, have you?"
"For the suffering which she endures …"
"Something which fathers have no idea about," she continued. "And without the blessing of their mother, children will know neither happiness on earth nor the heavenly paradise …"
"You will see me often, my mother. I will come to SaintOuen as often as possible. I have a hard job, you know. To hold up, I need energy, I need to be organized … and I need your blessing."
"Do you think I brought my sons into this world so this would be the result? So they would finish me off before my time? Is that what you want, apple of my eye? To kill me?" Find my way out of the rubble. Endure your jeremiads no longer. Be rid of your begetter-of-sons demands. Iwant to live. Freely. I was about to toss this into her face. But I didn't. Pointless to torment her. I would have all the time I needed, sitting at my computer, in the lovely bedroom with its alcoves, overlooking the foliage and the singing blackbird, to release my words and settle my accounts, with the help of poetry. At this point in time, I needed her blessing. Bestowing upon her the smile that always got the better of her, causing her to melt like ice cream in the sun, I said, "I absolutely have to be in Paris." As she did not budge, I pursued, gravely, "If I am to progress in my work."
"Your living here didn't stop you being promoted every year, and with your degrees you can work wherever you want."
"And I work in Paris." She burst into tears. "What have I done to you?" By the fourth sob I was on my feet. I knelt beside her, took her hand, kissed it several times over—another gesture which never left her unmoved—and said, "I don't mean to make you unhappy, my mother. But I have made my decision, and there's no going back."
"And Ramadan?" she asked, with a start. "What about Ramadan?" She took offense: "What do you mean, my son, what about Ramadan? Have you gone so far as to forget Ramadan?" And she moaned: "To think that you a
re the only one of my children who received a real religious education. Do you remember how, in Blida, your grandfather would puff out his chest when he went with you at dawn to the Koranic school?"
"I remember, my mother," I replied, scarcely able to hide my weariness. "So how will you spend Ramadan, then, all alone in Paris?"
"It is only July, my mother, and this year Ramadan isn't until October …"
"September," she corrected. "Between now and then—"
"Between now and then you will surely be married, my son," she interrupted, suddenly enthusiastic. "That's right, my mother, between now and then I will surely be married," I sighed. "And I'll be able to leave this world with my soul in peace."
"After a long life, my mother."
"Before Ramadan?"
"Yes, my mother …"
"You promise?"
"Inshallah, my mother. Before Ramadan."
"Inshallah, apple of my eye. And then your brother can get married in turn. Otherwise his fiancée's parents will end up giving their daughter to another family. And what would become of your brother?"
"That's true, my mother."
"And then we can make the hajj as planned. Your brother and his wife, and you and your wife, inshallah, ya rabbi. Ourida and Ali. All together, my son, to the holy places …"
"Yes, my mother."
"Maybe you already have someone in mind, my son?"
"I have no one in mind, my mother. For the time being."
"You came home late last night …"
"Work, my mother … So do I have your blessing?" I quickly asked. "You do, apple of my eye, you do." She went, standing up straight and, reaching for her prayer mat, she murmured the ritual salutations. Delighted that things had come to this positive conclusion, I got up and in turn unrolled a prayer mat next to my pious mother. It wasn't all that complicated after all, scorpion, whispered the voice into my left ear just as my mother and I began our prostrations.
At the end of the afternoon, after numerous negotiations to be released from the obligation to stay for supper, with my suitcase and my old sleeping bag in the trunk, my new books and a few of my records on the passenger seat, and my computer and my little stereo on the backseat, I left the low-income-housing district of Saint-Ouen, pursued by packages of makrouts, and sobs, and my mother's reminders.
You'll eat them for breakfast, apple of my eye. Find yourself a proper girl, my son. Your choices will be mine, my adored one. Don't forget your mother, light of my days. And so on and so forth, until the car took off toward the lights of Paris.
PART TWO
THE LOST WOMEN
"There is no sure concomitant that is not accompanied by a coincidence." L'Intuition de l'instant
GASTONBACHELARD
"What stranger here does not feel at home? But that is how you feel, as soon as night falls. In this immense city, you do not have your place, Or so you believe; the nightmare is beginning." Ombre gardienne
A week later, said he, the night was at its peak, the city was bubbling with excitement, and I went back to my apartment, alone. I had just spent the evening with the forty-something woman, who simply dumped me right there outside the restaurant.
We had had dinner at the little Thai place on the rue JulesChaplain, two strides from my house. A dinner during which she began by describing in detail her former life in Algiers, where she used to teach, living with her family in the heart of the Kasbah—"I was free during the day, and locked up at night," she had said with a smile. Her mother, desperate over the fact that her daughter had no suitor, and certain that the girl was bewitched, had gone off searching for the swallow which, according to the matron of the house, carried the curse that was responsible for the spell cast over her daughter, she hadadded. But that was a long story.
Then all of a sudden, with none of the poise or restraint she had shown on our first meeting, she became completely hyper, borderline obscene, and poured out her feelings as if I were her lifelong friend. Something one ought never to do in the presence of a future and imminent lover.
In the beginning, with the exception of a few passages which she related without blushing or batting an eyelash—for example, that in Algiers, to get her passport, she had had to sleep with an important civil servant, an execrable but powerful guy—I was hoping that she would soon cease spilling out her sordid past, for my mind was focused rather on my leather sofa and my single malt scotch and my oval bathtub and the blackbird's song, and I was looking forward to the steamy night that awaited me, or so I thought, and so I confess I did not retain much of what she was telling me.
Then, fearful she might become aware of my lack of interest, I forced myself to follow her tale, which I picked up again at the point when she was describing how she went through hell to sort out her situation—immigrant shelters, soup kitchens, suicide attempts, psychoanalysts from the Primo Levi Association, or something like that, without whom, she whispered, she would not be here calmly having dinner with me. Then more sleeping around to help with the paperwork, to make it official. With a socialist member of parliament. A nice enough guy, she said, but he was getting old, and sticky.
When I nearly choked on a mouthful of Pad Thai she finally changed the subject, and informed me that she had read Djamila and Her Mother (the book she'd been leafing through at the Flore, and which, she reminded me, had attracted my attention) and that she knew the author personally. They'd met in Algiers. In the literature department at the university. And in Paris the novelist had put her up for a time, which enabled her to stop her drifting, and the novelist had helped her with formalities and all that. When her first novel came out, my forty-something was still living under her roof, but because of a journalist who had revealed that the author was using a pseudonym, insinuating moreover that she would never write another book, Loubna Minbar had sunk into paranoia worthy of psychiatric confinement—she saw killers everywhere, a man in a raincoat outside her window, another one who was stalking her all over Paris—and no longer opened the door or even the shutters, she never left the house, not even to go to work, so she lost the job that she'd had in addition to the freelance stuff she did here and there for the papers and which she signed under her own name and which had enabled her to pay for her room and board. And then, when she learned that a certain historian who specialized in Algeria had been obliged to accept a position in Vietnam following threats he'd received, she left Paris nearly crazy with panic and went into exile elsewhere—Sidi Bou Said, Berlin, Zurich, Hamburg—and as a result my interlocutor, Hadda Bouchnaffa, once again found herself out in the street.
Thinking about my project for a book, but without mentioning it to her, I asked her if she could give me her friend's contact information. But she refused, under the pretext that her novelist friend had shut herself away so that she could write, and that she traveled a great deal, not to run away, but because her books were published in a number of countries and, in any case, not a single one of her friends was seeing her these days. And that when it was all over, she moved on.
"When it was all over?"
Sidestepping my question, she began to talk about the novelist again who, it would seem, was at that very moment, while we were conversing, working on some sort of interview with an Islamist whose mother, a widow of fifty years old or so and who used to be pious and a real stickler for principles, had virtually converted overnight to sin and was living with a poet, a West Indian who was not only as black as coal but also Christian to the tips of his fingers. Yes. Yes. And that through this story Loubna Minbar revealed episodes of her own life, like the one about the journalist-informer with his crummy reviews, or the one about the Algerian novelist who, because she had criticized him for taking everybody in with his female pseudonym and his crime fiction, had nicknamed her Madame Alas. Or the story about the director of the Algerian Cultural Center who, because her books did not flatter his country's politics, was so hostile that he refused to send her invitations for any of the Center's events. And a few more anecdo
tes of that nature—spite, revenge, censorship, and so on.
The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris Page 8