Sherazade

by Leïla Sebbar

  'And the war?' asked Sherazade.

  'That's another story.'

  Julien had no desire to talk about the Algerian War, after the Louvre.

  Nedroma

  Julien's father had left a little town in the Department of Charente to come to teach in Algeria. First of all in a tiny village, then in Nedroma. He had met other teachers, Frenchmen for the most part, and some Arabs, 'Natives' educated at the Bouzarea Teachers' Training College in Algiers. That's how he'd heard of Mouloud Feraoun, a poor peasant's son like so many who had been encouraged by their village teacher to get to this Training College in Algiers, a mirage and a miracle. Julien had often listened to his father's friends talking, teachers in the Oran and Tlemcen regions, in Hennaya, Nemours. ainTemouchent . . . when they met in a dim classroom to set up a network to provide help in the form of cash or medical supplies for the Moujahideen. His father didn't stop him coming into this classroom and Julien understood, without it being spelled out, that he was supposed to stand guard. Afterwards, his father and friends went over to the schoolhouse for coffee or tea and the cakes his mother had baked for them; she was just as good at Arab cooking as French cooking. The daughter of French settlers, she had left her home near Setif in Eastern Algeria and moved to the Oran area when she fell in love. She would have liked to become a doctor, but settlers' families were not very keen on girls getting an education at that time. Like all colonial girls at the village school, she had learned to sew, embroider, look after a house and a farmyard and the garden adjoining the farmhouse. Her father had insisted on teaching the girls as well as the boys to shoot. They rode over the vast plateaux given over to cereal crops and the girls galloped headlong just like their brothers. They could fire a pistol or a rifle as well as their mothers and grandmothers who, at the turn of the century, never left the house without a tiny pistol in the deep pocket of their peasant skirts, when they went to keep an eye on the sowing with two or three Arab farmhands, three miles from the village. These women got up at three in the morning, harnessed the horse and drove the cart to the fields. The men were off fighting. Julien's mother had been brought up by these strong, hardy pioneers who could embroider, manage a farm property, fire a rifle, gallop over the high plateaux, nurse and deliver the women in the mechtas, go the rounds with their boxes of medecines, give injections, help the teachers in the sewing-classes. Later, when they had left Algeria for good, after the war, Julien's mother showed him one day the detailed reports on the 'Training Courses for Native Girls' in a town school and a country school respectively:

  RUE MARENGO PRIMARY SCHOOL, ALGIERS

  Headmistress: Mlle Quetteville

  – five classes;

  – 170 pupils in the school;

  – sixteen full-time apprentices, joined in the afternoon by the pupils from the two top classes;

  – fourteen tall-warp looms;

  – several small looms and frames for embroidery and lace-making. When the girls become expert, they are paid, with double rate for work done over and above the fixed daily task. Bonuses are added for particularly well-executed work. This school produces carpets, copied from antique Persian and Copt designs, also cushions, Turkish, Algerian and Moroccan embroidery and needle-lace.

  BUDGET: income from sale of work and a subsidy of 2000 francs from the Government.

  SCHOOL CANTEEN: two pupils from each of the three top classes take turns to cook the midday meal and see to the cleanliness of the canteen.

  – Apprentices and pupils are taught domestic work:

  • Monday, overalls, towels, loom-covers are washed, heavy laundry done twice a month;

  • Tuesday, mending, darning stockings;

  • Wednesday, ironing, with and without starch;

  • Friday, scouring out saucepans, copper-ware;

  • Saturday, general clean-out of kitchen, refectory and workroom.

  PREPARATION OF TROUSSEAU: This work undertaken by Mlle Quetteville is very interesting. The basic materials are supplied by sympathizers who have formed a committee. The work is done by the pupils who make a trousseau on Thursday afternoons which will be given them when they reach the age of sixteen.

  This trousseau comprises:

  – a town outfit complete with haik and velvet embroidered bodice;

  – two indoor costumes, one for winter, one for summer.

  – two veils adorned with embroidery and lace;

  – four chemises;

  – six handkerchiefs;

  – six hand towels;

  – six dusters;

  – three pairs of stockings;

  – one silk scarf.

  SCHOOL AT AΪT-HICHEM (near Michelet)

  This was one of the first schools open to children of both sexes (1890). The workshop was awarded a prize at the International Exhibition of 1900 for its dressmaking and embroidery work.

  In 1913 the school comprises:

  – thirty-four pupils aged thirteen to sixteen;

  – eight looms.

  The pupils are not paid a fixed wage but receive small sums to encourage them.

  SCHOOL BUDGET:

  – Subsidy from Government;

  – Subsidy from the mixed Commune;

  – Income from the sale of work to the Natives and tourists.

  At first, the pupils were taught by their teacher how to make so-called deep-pile carpets, but wool was expensive in the area. To save money, another teacher introduced them to the method of doing the genuine Berber low-pile weaving which makes a hard-wearing fabric with very original geometric patterns, using the technique rediscovered by M. Ricard. This weaving has become the speciality of ait-Hichem, but the girls are still taught to make deep-pile carpets. The school subsists on the sympathy of the local inhabitants. The notables let their daughters attend as long as possible and former pupils send their sisters and daughters.

  Julien read to the end of these pages and promised himself he would do some research into primary schoolteachers in Algeria, at the Overseas Archives in Aix-en-Provence, but he got bitten by a passion for Orientalist painting and gradually discovered he had all the sublime faults of a collector.

  The War of Independence did not put a stop to Julien's mother's nursing activities. She went off fearlessly, just as her grandmother had done, and she even gave first aid to a wounded man, the husband of an Arab woman whom she'd just delivered, with the help of the old village midwife-healer, certainly a Moujahid, but she hadn't asked any questions. She'd mentioned it to her husband when she got home and he hadn't warned her against this. He knew she'd go just the same, but she didn't take Julien with her any more, as she did when he was small, before the war.

  Bouzarea

  The Native teachers, Arabs and Berbers, his father's friends, spoke French. Julien's mother knew Arabic, Julien could speak and understand a bit, but his father had never managed to learn it. Those evenings Julien did not go off to bed. He stayed up in the sitting-room with the adults who chatted and listened to the radio for the news. These men had been children. Julien was surprised every time they spoke of them, little boys. Some of them were born in Tenes, some in Cherchell, others in Marnia or M'Sila. One of them had told of his childhood in Tenes between 1920 and 1925. His mother had been widowed with five children. He was the oldest. At five in the morning he went to the Qur'anic School until half-past seven. He had a cup of coffee and a little bit of dry bread. From eight till eleven, then from one till four in the afternoon it was the French school. At half-past four till nightfall it was back to the Qur'anic School. The evening meal was very light, the teacher from Tenes emphasized. He went to bed at nine o'clock after doing his homework by the light of a candle or paraffin lamp. On Thursdays he worked as a porter at the market to earn a little money. Sunday mornings also. On Thursday afternoons he did odd jobs for his mother, fetching water for the laundry and to wash with. On Sunday afternoons, he went back to the Qur'anic School. When he was twelve he had to work the whole summer as an auctioneer's messenger, valet, Waiter, t
o earn enough to buy the obligatory outfit for the Boufarik boarding school. He was always top in maths but couldn't understand the Iliad or the Odyssey at all. He was to enter the Engineering College at Maison-Carrthe Engineering College at Maison-Carrée, near Algiers. He didn't have a certificate of French nationality. So he applied to the teacher-training college to become a Native pupil-teacher. He was accepted the same year as Mouloud Feraoun: 'On 28 September, we were all at Bouzarea with our suitcases and our cheap suits, bought at the Chartres market. The Algiers teacher-training college was France's second largest; for a hundred and eighty French pupil-teachers there were twenty Algerians. Emmanuel Roblès was a second-year student, he ran the college magazine which was called The Profane. The young pupil-teachers did their first teaching practice in schools in the Casbah opposite the Barberousse Prison. The boys would make obscene remarks in Arabic to test out the teacher. If he didn't react, he was a Roumi . . . Then they either helped him or played him up . . . The first time I went to France on a school journey, I was overwhelmed by the amount of water: I saw lakes, rivers, ponds everywhere, and by the size of the trees . . . In Paris we did all the sights. When I got back my mother said, "I thought that people who went to France came back fat and well, and you're pale and skinny." On 1 October 1935 I was appointed to El-Bordj, twenty miles from Mascara. I had fifty-six pupils. At the end of the first month I had earned 988.12 francs. With my brother who had accompanied me we ate noodles with eggs, cutlets, cakes and plenty of peanuts . . .

  'After El-Bordj, the little school at Aflou on the High Plateaux of Djebel-Amour saw me arrive with my wife, a Frenchwoman from France, on 15 September 1940. The following year I had a son. We rode a lot at that time . . .'

  Later, some of the friends of Julien's father were imprisoned by the French, others killed in the maquis. In France, where he'd returned to his family's village in Charente, his father heard that Mouloud Feraoun and other Algerians had been murdered by an OAS commando. Julien saw his father weep when he heard the news on the radio. From Algeria, his mother had only brought back linen, crockery, the family photograph album, some picture postcards and some minor Orientalist pictures that Julien had recently taken out of suitcases stored in his flat. He had covered a whole wall with them. It was strange. The family property on the Setif plateaux had become an agricultural cooperative. The house was occupied by Arab families and surrounded by reed or wooden fences. His mother had gone back there alone, with her sisters, to pay her respects to the family dead. Like many repatriates, she wanted to check the state of the graves, see that they were kept clean and the tombstones in place. The women were very devoted to the dead and went to visit them, to make sure they were still there, and that the graves had not been desecrated as happened to some during the war. Their dead were all right. They were keen to leave them safe, protected by their solid tombstones or their vaults. They had died on the soil where they were born, for all those who had had to expatriate themselves and who would never return to live and die here. Certain women had refused to return to Algeria. They Waited to die in exile, in a foreign land, in the cold and mist, complaining softly.

  As for certain French people from Algeria, repatriated to France, Algeria after 1962 did not exist, and as they had left nothing living there, only furniture, Henri II-style dining-room suites, pianos . . . pilgrimages were organized to the cemeteries where the women could find their dead again. Julien's mother had been about to spend one or two weeks in Tlemcen for one of these spring pilgrimages, but she had no dead relatives there so she gave up the idea. A Tunisian woman had told her with tears in her eyes of the first return after the exodus. A brother had been buried in the little French cemetery surrounded by cypresses just like in France, the sort of cypresses which nearly always enclosed large farms in North Africa, and particularly in Algeria, owned by settlers. She and her sister had searched several times for the grave without being able to find it. They had persisted and went back every day as if their brother's name would suddenly strike the foot or catch the eye of one of the two women, until one day an Arab came up to them and said, 'Are you looking for the grave of . . .? It's over there.' That man had recognized them, twenty years later. He had always looked after the cemetery, he lived close by and had seen them, day after day, loyally, anxiously walking round the graveyard, up and down the paths, leaving to put off to the next day the search which they were unwilling to give up. One morning he had Waited for them and slowly approached them. He told them correctly the name of the deceased and showed them where the grave was. He told them the truth. They wondered why they hadn't looked in that corner. That stone on which they could read the name, the dates of his birth and death, and a few words of a conventional epitaph nearly effaced.

  As they left the cemetery with tears in their eyes, they thanked the Tunisian who shook their hands warmly.

  Pierrot

  Sherazade left the fast-food without a glance at Julien. He nearly got up and followed her. To run and catch up with her, talk to her some more. He did nothing. He just watched her through the glass door.

  Before she came to live in one, Sherazade had never heard the word. She didn't even know it was English. It sounded like that strange name they called Red Indian women in the comics her brothers read, and when they played indoors on rainy days, she acted the squaw, according to her brother's scenario. She hadn't thought to ask if it was English, American or Indian. She would have rather thought it was a word in the Indian language, but she wasn't sure. When her brothers told her, 'We're going to play cowboys and Indians with the cowboys attacking the Indian camp,' she knew she'd be the squaw with her baby tied on her back. She'd been quite happy to play the squaw until the time she'd been kidnapped by the Whitemen on horseback. She'd quarrelled with her brothers as they said the squaw had to stay at home by the tent with the children and the other women and during the attacks she wasn't allowed to go near the river. Sherazade had escaped and gone outside the camp; it was near the river that the Whitemen on horseback had surprised her, leaning over the water; they had snatched her up, slung her on to a horse and carried her off riding pillion behind one of them to the train to the nearest American town.

  After this episode her brothers didn't play Cowboys and Indians with her any more; but she still saw the word written and read it though her brothers never pronounced it again.

  She remembered that exact word when she heard – squat - for the first time. Pierrot had suggested she come to live in the old building where he was squatting with his mates. She'd made him repeat the foreign word, so he'd explained that he lived with some boys and girls in an empty flat that they didn't pay rent for as the building was due to be demolished. He added, 'But where d'you come from? Everybody knows what squatting means? Don't you go out or anything?'

  'I'm from Aulnay-sous-Bois, from the Mille-Mille.'

  'Then you must know Krim. He comes from there too. But he's from the Trois Mille or thereabouts . . .'

  'Aulnay-sous-Bois is a big place.'

  'I'm sure your father works at Citroën,' Pierrot added.

  'Yes.'

  Djamila

  Pierrot had given Sherazade the address of the squat and ever since she'd been living there she always spoke and thought of it as 'the squat'. She shared a room with Djamila, a girl who'd turned up one evening with Krim. He'd met her in Rue Saint-Séverin where she'd been looking for the number of a building she'd jotted down on a torn envelope in Marseilles before leaving. She was sure of finding someone but she soon realized the number didn't exist. The street wasn't that long. She hadn't thought to check it on a map of Paris. They'd laughed at her in the first café she'd gone into to ask. She'd drunk a cup of coffee at the counter to give herself time to find another address in the spiral notebook whose cover was half falling off. It was a girls' hostel. She'd been told she could stay there a few nights. The café proprietor who she asked to show her the way grumbled that it wasn't just next door and it was impossible to explain and she'd get lost if she was a
stranger thereabouts.

  As she insisted, he asked his wife, who was at the cash-desk, for the map of Paris which he opened up on the counter so that Djamila could follow the fat red finger which slowly wandered over the map. He wasn't a Parisian. He came from Aveyron like nearly all the café proprietors in Paris. His brain seized up in front of a map. After a few minutes, when the finger grew stiffer and stiffer and was coming to a halt just anywhere, Djamila suggested she look at the map herself on an empty table, at the back of the café, near the toilet-and-telephone area, which stank as usual. She knew how to read a map. She had found her way to Paris on her own, with a road map. She'd left in such a hurry that she hadn't had time to take her mother's cheque-book that she'd intended to use for the train tickets. She had fifty francs in her pocket. She'd crossed France somehow to get to Paris where she had no idea what she was going to do. Why Paris? She knew no one there, whereas in the Bassens housing estate where she'd been living for years, she couldn't walk three yards without having to greet someone in French or Arabic with, 'Hi! How are things?' Among the girls on the estate she'd been the only one to pass her baccalauréat in a year when several had tried. She'd decided long ago to leave as soon as she had her certificate. She'd said so to her mother, explaining she absolutely had to go to Algeria to find her father and brothers who she hadn't seen for nearly ten years. Her mother was a Frenchwoman who'd had a job at the check-out in a supermarket in Marseilles when her father married her. In spite of having seven children, her mother had always gone on working. The father, a mechanic in a garage, had gone off one day, leaving his wife to bring up the five girls, taking the two boys with him, the eldest and the youngest of the children. The mother had done everything to try to get her sons back but nothing helped. The father, an Algerian, didn't have to answer for his actions to France, once he'd settled in Algeria with his Algerian sons. Djamila's mother heard nothing more of this man who'd been her husband, nor of her two sons. She hadn't had the courage to go to Algeria to look for her children and everybody who'd tried to help her had dissuaded her. Djamila heard from an Algerian who worked in the garage, where she used to drop in to see her father on her way to school, that he'd gone back to the Setif district where he was born and had set up a garage there. It was doing well because second-hand cars there could be repaired till they were only fit for the scrap-heap. 'Car-repairing is a gold-mine,' the Algerian had said. Djamila's father had married again, a cousin from Setif whose father had a little shop. Everything was fine for him. Djamila had insisted on the Algerian telling her the name of her father's village. The Algerian hesitated, then wrote it for her on the bus ticket she held out to him.