Sherazade

by Leïla Sebbar

  Djamila showed the ticket to her mother who just about managed to read it. She'd never been to Algeria and she wasn't very keen on Arabs either. Djamila had realized this one evening when she'd overheard her parents quarrelling. She hadn't wanted to eavesdrop but she couldn't help hearing her mother's voice as her Marseilles accent got even more marked when she shouted and she couldn't forget the words she kept repeating through her sobs, 'Go back to your own country,' and her father, who rolled his Rs, shouting back, 'I'm going tomorrow.' One morning he wasn't to be seen, and the boys didn't return to their respective schools where their father had gone to meet them to catch the plane.

  Djamila's mother didn't try to understand why her daughter wanted to go to Algeria. She pointed to the door and said she could leave, she wouldn't stop her.

  Instead of taking the boat to Algiers, Djamila had turned up in Paris, not really knowing how. She hadn't forgotten her passport nor the paper showing she'd passed her first qualifying exam.

  In Rue Saint-Séverin, Krim suggested the squat. She followed him. Sherazade had been there for a few weeks already. She offered Djamila the other mattress as every room was occupied. Driss told Krim he wasn't to bring a new boy or girl every day, there were enough of them already as it was, the flat wasn't a dormitory or a home for down-and-outs and he'd kick the next ones out himself. Krim swore at him in Arabic and Driss who hadn't got up when Djamila arrived, jumped to his feet ready to start a fight. Krim regularly attended the classes in unarmed combat at a gym where fellows of his age, often Arabs, Algerians and Moroccans, trained like crazy. Quick, agile and aggressive, they had the qualities that the instructors looked for and if they hadn't registered in such large numbers as soon as the lists opened the trainers would have gone into the housing estates to recruit them. But they came of their own accord, two or three at a time, or in gangs, and they could be seen walking together wearing tracksuits, practising in the Metro, on the platforms, in the trains, lunging out at an imaginary enemy, with the technical shouts that they learned in the classes. The French people from the suburbs stared at them, tired, speechless, anxious. They were scared of getting the comer of an Adidas bag hurled at full speed clipping them on the cheek or the ear. But the boys were so skilful they skimmed but never touched anyone; they provoked, knowing full well that the people sitting around were waiting for the slightest bungled shot to start yelling. They appeared not to see anyone, but they had already spotted the passengers' surly expressions, tight lips, clenched fists. They kept their activity to one square yard, shouting and laughing, using words they were the only ones to understand. Driss knew Krim's strength and skill. He didn't persist but he went on muttering to himself, curled up in the red armchair, in front of the TV.

  Krim went into the kitchen with Djamila. Pierrot and Basile were preparing a Caribbean dish and Pierrot was insisting he knew the special spices better than Basile and the right amount for the sauce to go with the fish.

  Meriem

  Sherazade was in the Metro, on the Etoile Nation line. She was listening to a little girl who was spelling out the names of all the stations, until every time the train crossed the Seine, she started pulling her mother's face towards the window shouting, 'The Seine, the Seine'. Because of the excitement of the child who was leaving the suburban tenement blocks or subtopian housing development for the first time, she had removed the headphones of the Walkman for a moment. Sherazade had decided that day to tune in to the independent radio stations and she had replaced her cassette player with her transistor. As soon as the Metro went underground, Sherazade tuned in to Carbon 14 and stayed with it briefly, whereas the indicator normally moved ceaselessly from one station to another, as she always thought the next one would be better. So the needle moved from leftto right, then from right to left, without a break, across the dial on which the marks she'd made to hold the station she liked slipped because of her haste.

  She knew the names, the frequencies, the places on the dial of all the stations, and the list of the ones she listened to most often was always on her lips. She could have recited them in order:

  Radio-Beurs, Paris 106.1 MHz.

  Generation 2 000, Paris 88.4 MHz.

  Radio-Tipsy, Paris 88.8 MHz.

  Radio-Libertarian, Paris 84.5 MHz.

  NRG (energy), Paris 92 MHz.

  Rock Boulevard, Paris 94.6 MHz.

  Radio-Tomato, Paris 94.2 MHz.

  Carbon 14, Paris 97.30 MHz.

  Radio Sunshine, Paris 98.2 MHz.

  Judaic, Paris 103.35 MHz.

  Carbon 14 was broadcasting messages like many other stations, but this time Sherazade stopped looking round her to concentrate on listening to the radio. She'd just heard her own first name. She knew it was uncommon and didn't immediately grasp that it really was her name; someone was sending her a message. The person who was reading the message had paused after 'Sherazade' to say, 'I'd really like to meet the girl who's got that name, if it isn't a false name . . . Because when you're called "Sherazade" . . .' He repeated the name several times, then broke off to give this Sherazade the telephone number of the station, if she wanted to ring she'd be given a free hand, she could do and say anything, everything . . . with a name like that . . . Sherazade was growing impatient. Was he never going to read that message. With the independent radio stations it was always like that, endless wisecracks . . . this time, it was serious. She pressed the headphones tight to her ears. The announcer was still wise-cracking. At the next public phone, when she got out of the Metro, she'd let him have a mouthful. That would stop his jaw for him. She'd forgotten she was in the compartment, she was going to shout to the fellow to shut up. She heard, 'Sherazade, it's me, Meriem. Just say you're alive.' Sherazade snatched off the headphones, rushed out on to the platform, tore up the escalators, jostling the protesting users, ran along the boulevard to a phone box.

  She knew the number by heart. The money was ready in the left pocket of her jacket. She hung up before hearing the phone ring in her own home.

  Sherazade

  The day Julien Desrosiers had first spoken to Sherazade, because of this name that he'd heard pronounced Sheherazade, with an aspirated H and rolled R, by an Arab who'd called out to her in the square in front of Beaubourg, a pal from the squat, Driss, who Julien would never get to know, as during all the weeks that he was to put her up, she never mentioned him once, in spite of his frequent allusions to the evenings and the nights when she didn't come back to his place, that day Sherazade happened not to have put on her Mexican boots or her red shoes with pointed toes and stiletto heels that she liked to wear with black fishnet stockings to visit nightclubs, pretending to be a bimbo according to Pierrot, who couldn't stand black stockings especially fishnet, he thought they made her look like a tart and Sherazade retorted, 'You would, wouldn't you, a square old militant like you.'

  'Not so old as all that. I'm twenty-seven. You're not going to tell me I look like Krivin. Besides, I haven't got a tie.'

  'Krivin, who's he? Never heard of him.'

  'You're just an ignoramus.'

  That day, Sherazade was wearing white tennis shoes, useful if she had to make a dash for it after shoplifting in the superstores, which was often less risky than in small boutiques. Besides, she'd tried on these tennis shoes in the sports department of a big store, Porte d'ltalie or Montparnasse with its hundred and one boutiques, or it might have been Galaxie, eventually she forgot exactly where she'd nicked things, as quickly as she forgot the things themselves that she deposited at the bottom of a cupboard and that everybody in the squat used. However, she hadn't planned anything that morning as she laced up the soft white leather shoes that she'd left the shop wearing, first walking very fast then breaking into a run, leaving behind an old pair of cheap boots that her mother had gone with her to buy at Monoprix when the sales were on. The leather uppers had cracked the first time she was out in the rain and the soles hadn't lasted long in the mud of the housing estate. She was still wearing them the day she'd decided to leav
e for good and she took the first opportunity of jettisoning them on the mottled grey carpet at the feet of the disgusted assistant who'd been too slow to react, taking a few hesitating steps behind Sherazade, shouting 'Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!' as she pushed open the door and ran off towards the Metro. The assistant had let her try on several pairs of tennis shoes, even lending her a pair of white socks with red and blue stripes which were kept for customers, in spite of her surprise at the bare feet emerging from the old boots. She'd been patient with this girl whom she ought to have been suspicious of and who'd wasted her time as she obsessively fingered the leather and compared the leather of the different pairs, finally deciding on the most expensive ones. 'Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!' The saleswoman nearly sprained her left ankle on her way back to the department. She sat down on the seat Sherazade had just vacated and furiously kicked at the boots left lying on the carpet. The manageress watched her. She couldn't say anything. The assistant wasn't to blame. The next time they'd have to be more suspicious of that sort of girl.

  'Take those boots and throw them away.'

  The assistant got up, picked up the boots with the fingers of one hand while holding her nose with the other, and threw them in the large wastepaper-basket near the cash-desk.

  'Selima, wrap them up. It looks bad,' the manageress said. 'Or else put them in an empty box.'

  For the red shoes, Sherazade had been more cautious. She'd hankered after them for a long time, even if eventually she hadn't worn them often. She'd chosen a fairly big shop, crowded with customers and saleswomen. She'd asked to see five different styles including the red ones, she'd tried them all on to make sure the red ones suited her; she'd told the assistant the red ones didn't really fit and while she went down to find the size bigger, Sherazade had put the pair of shoes in her bag under a pullover and shut the box which she placed under the others. She Waited patiently, tried on the last pair which were too big. She thanked the assistant nicely who'd had to go back and forth twice to get the boxes down, said goodbye before the empty box disappeared under the other three, and left with a smile. She turned at the comer of the first street and went into a café. In the Ladies, she'd nearly made a mistake and gone into the Gentlemen at the bottom of the stairs that she'd raced down, she took out the shoes and gazed at them as long as the fluorescent switch that had to be pressed for the light to come on permitted.

  That evening, back at the squat, she showed them off to the others. Pierrot thought them ridiculous and it was Djamila who wore them more often than Sherazade.

  Pierrot

  When Sherazade came out of the phone box she ran all the way till she got back to the room she had to herself until Djamila arrived. The door was ajar. She couldn't see anyone. She rushed to her bed and threw herself face down on the red cover that she had swopped at the flea market for a bundle of polka-dotted blouses, fifties style.

  She lay sobbing.

  Krim, Basile and Pierrot were practising the electric guitar, banjo and drums, in a room they'd fixed up with salvaged sheets of cork. They also had a zither and an acoustic guitar that the father of one of their pals had brought back one day for his son, one of Krim's mates. The father was a dustman, working for the council, in the well-to-do districts and he seldom came home from work without something he'd found to give his wife or children. It was always a surprise. He was a handyman and repaired the toys, furniture, musical instruments that his wife or children decided to keep. So they all felt rich with these treasures that they'd never have found anywhere else, and though their father told them to write 'seasonal worker' where they had to fill in father's occupation at the beginning of every school year, they weren't ashamed of his job. They thought, up to the day when they learned, at school most often, that someone who collects rubbish is called a 'dustman' or more usually a 'garbage man', that their father was a 'seasonal worker' a bit like the scrap merchants they saw round the waste ground near the housing estates. Anyway, when they knew the word 'dustman' they didn't connect it with household rubbish. When they were small, the father took the boys, on the days when there was no school, and let them sit in the large cabin in the front of the big green lorry next to the driver, from where they could just glimpse the street. They couldn't see their father working at the back. They were as happy as if they were in a fire-brigade car, or rather a fire-engine, a real red one with siren, hose, ladder and flashing blue light.

  When the dustcart drove into the incineration plant, the children stood up in the cabin to watch the operations. Back home, in the evening, they told their sisters and younger brothers who were not yet old enough to be allowed this outing, all about their day. The girls protested but their father was adamant. He promised them even more surprising surprises.

  Krim's pal dropped in at the squat now and then with a musical instrument which he lent or gave them and that Pierrot tried to repair. He'd learned how to work with wood and certain metals, in the workshop back home with his father who was a mineworker in Bruay-en-Artois. His father, the son of Polish immigrants, thought if his son was training to be a chemical engineer, as he wanted to, he ought to be capable of doing anything with his hands. Pierrot used to spend his Sundays shut up in the workshops adjoining the garden of the house in the mining village where he'd grown up. It was a fine wooden workshop that Pierrot's father had built himself and divided into two sections: one for his DIY, and the other for his wife who was a dressmaker. It was a sort of sewing-room with a table for cutting out, a long mirror, a dressmaker's dummy and Singer sewing machine that her parents had given her the day she married the Pole. She was French from Douai and never managed to learn Polish that her husband spoke when they went on Sunday afternoons to visit the Polish in-laws. Pierrot couldn't speak his father's language, in spite of the repeated efforts of Polish cousins who Pierrot's father had asked not to speak French to the child. After a few minutes, especially if they were alone, some distance from the house, near the stream at the bottom of the garden, the children began speaking French among themselves, forgetting the family's recommendations. Pierrot knew a few words of Polish that he forgot in Paris. But whenever the need arose, Pierrot found he hadn't lost his manual skill in spite of his militant, political activities. Besides, the comrades in his group didn't take long to find out that Pierrot's abilities were valuable to them. It wasn't a matter of repairing a zither or a mandoline. They asked him to teach them, among other things, how to make a Molotov cocktail and also small bombs that you had to know exactly how much explosive to use. Pierrot secretly ran practical courses for his comrades in a sort of cubicle that they'd hurriedly erected at the end of a shed where a scrap merchant stored his material, ignorant of what was going on behind the wooden partitions. He knew the lads, their families, and shared their political ideas – they were all Reds in the working-class districts on the outskirts of the city – the fathers were no longer very militant but the sons were very active without ever talking about what they did. For them, so their sons thought, it was enough to be a Communist.

  Basile

  One evening, a comrade turned up at the cubicle with a book under his arm and a new recruit. It was Basile. He introduced him as a militant revolutionary from the West Indies. From Guadaloupe, Basile corrected him. He spoke of the armed struggle. They listened to him. He spoke for three hours and was accepted, until the day when he tried to make his comrades listen to the history of the Rasta movement. The militarist militants made fun of this speech and this 'under-developed' tendency. Pierrot was the only one Basile could talk to. Soon they met again at the squat where they were to live together for several months, sharing their passion for music, politics and their fascination with an underground armed revolution which they still believed in, egging each other on to read everything that had been written or told about the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigade, the Russian Terrorists, the Palestinian Revolutionaries, the Angolans . . .

  They both had managed to get hold of a .38 and some evenings, when they were alone with Sherazade
, they played at 'Indians', the name given to the Italian Autonomes.* They took up the position of the .38 marksman, holding the revolver at arm's length, legs apart and knees slightly bent, they closed one eye to take aim, facing each other; at that moment Sherazade instinctively closed her eyes until Basile and Pierrot burst out laughing simultaneously. Sherazade got up and asked Pierrot, 'Will you lend it to me?'

  'It's not a toy. It's not for birds . . .'

  Sherazade called him macho and asked Basile for his .38.

  'Mind out, it's loaded! Here, you hold it like this.'

  Basile launched into a long speech explaining that German and Italian women belonged to terrorist groups and could handle weapons as well as the men, they were good for other things besides being used as letter-boxes, couriers, and this was the beginning of equality and if in a revolution women could work as secretaries and nurses they could also be given power, responsibility . . . If Sherazade liked, she could very well become head of a network . . . Sherazade interrupted Basile.