Sherazade

by Leïla Sebbar

  'How should I know? Can't you find out for yourself?'

  'OK, Keep your hair on.'

  Julien got up noisily, splashing Sherazade who rushed out of the bathroom with a yell. She'd switched on her walkman. Julien realized he wouldn't be able to listen to France Musique or a Verdi opera he'd just bought. He handed Sherazade a catalogue. It was of a Matisse retrospective exhibition of 1956.

  'What's this?'

  'Look and see. Your walkman doesn't stop you reading, I suppose.'

  'No. But nobody tells me what to read.'

  'OK.'

  Julien took back the catalogue, sat down in the armchair and read to himself, as one studies a telephone directory or a catalogue from La Redoute, Les Trois Suisses, La Camif* when you're put out and calm your nerves by meticulously scrutinizing a printed page, any printed matter, concentrating on the minutest detail, careful not to omit anything and if you do to go back over what you missed out. So he read, while Sherazade sat at his drawing-table in the bedroom, writing to Driss in prison, but Julien didn't know what she was doing and he mustn't ask her . . . He didn't like her sitting at his table writing in her little notebooks or her private letters while he was there. She could do that at any other time, waiting till he'd gone . . . but no. He got up, shut the bedroom door, sat down again in the wicker armchair and read:

  The Palm Leaf, Tangiers (1912) Oil on canvas. 118 x 80 cm.

  Signed bottom right.

  Private collection, New York.

  Still Life with Oranges (1912) Oil on canvas. 94 x 84 cm.

  Pablo Picasso collection.

  Moroccan Woman (1912) Oil on canvas. 36 x 28 cm.

  Grenoble Museum.

  Moroccan Men (1916) Oil on canvas, 178 x 281 cm.

  Signed bottom right.

  Museum of Modem Art, New York.

  The Green Gandoura (1916) Oil on wooden panel. 32 X 23 cm.

  Signed top left.

  Private collection, New York.

  Reclining Nude with Turban (1921) Oil on canvas. 38 X 62 cm.

  Signed top right.

  Marcel Mabille Collection, Brussels.

  The Moorish Screen (1922) Oil on canvas. 115 X 96 cm.

  Signed bottom right.

  The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  Odalisque with Magnolia (1924) Oil on canvas. 65 x 81 cm.

  Signed bottom right.

  Mr and Mrs Leigh B. Block Collection, Chicago.

  Odalisque with Red Casket (1927) Oil on canvas. 51 x 65 cm.

  Signed and dated bottom left.

  Private collection.

  The Negress (1952-53)Gouache pasted on canvas. 450 x 625 cm.

  No date or signature.

  Private collection.

  Matisse had made several visits to Morocco from 1911 onwards.

  * The eastern half of the Arab world. (Trans.)

  *All mail-order catalogues. The first two for the general public. CAMIF – Coopérative d'Achat Mutuelle d'Instituteurs de France, a cooperative for the sole benifit of teachers in goverment posts. (Trans.)

  Auteuil

  Before it got dark, Julien and Sherazade had gone round to the Auteuil Gardens which Sherazade had no idea existed, and which Julien had got to know recently thanks to a botanist friend who worked at the Museum of Natural History. So he'd learnt that they taught horticulture there, training the best gardeners in Paris. The gardens were frequently deserted; Parisians preferred the dusty woods where their dogs could have a run while their owners could keep in trim as well. You were allowed into the exotic conservatories, which was not possible in the Botanical Gardens, but they were hot and humid and you couldn't sit for long on the green-painted iron seats.

  Sherazade in jeans, with her Adidas and leather blouson, didn't immediately suggest odalisques or Algerian women . . . Sherazade wasn't thinking about them. She saw Julien smile as he looked at her, but didn't wonder why. When he smiled like that she knew he was happy.

  'What about taking some shots for the film here, in one of the conservatories?'

  'No way!'

  'Why? It's beautiful.'

  'It's so beautiful that you see it all the time in fashion adverts, boutiques or commercials for Club Méditerrannée and that sort of thing . . . local colour. So no way.'

  'You're right. I hadn't thought about that.'

  'You're always a hundred years behind the times with what you think, that's for sure.'

  'Charming as usual . . . We won't come here any more or rather I won't come to Auteuil to the gardens again with you.'

  'If it's for the film, you can come without me.'

  Meriem

  It was Thursday, dressmaking day. Sherazade's mother, who did sewing at home, had decreed, for her friends and all the women of the family known as cousins, a convenient word which covered every degree of relationship, that Thursday would be Dressmakers' Day. They all did a little sewing and on that day the flat became a workshop. Each woman arrived with her light equipment and her dress lengths; some of them had up to ten dresses on the go at once; they settled down and chatted, they cut out, adjusted, assembled, tried on, and the whole business without a pattern, without a magazine, just using their eyes. Sherazade and Meriem were allowed among the women on those afternoons, as their mother thought they would learn by watching and listening.

  The Thursday dresses were always for special occasions. They would be made in preparation for a wedding, a circumcision, the Feast of Eïd. It wasn't done to wear the same dress twice when you often met the same women, and then at these festivities you had to change several times a day. You arrived with a suitcase or a big bag in which the dresses were carefully folded. They could be shown off. Whatever were the latest materials to reach the Arab traders in Barbès or Montmartre became the fashion. The following week all the women wore the same material but the style varied according to the dressmaker. They were always lovely light materials with a sheen, in golds or silvers and with floral motifs printed on a background the colour of a pansy or a rose. The style was simple, nearly always gathered in at the waist with elastic and the dress would have full sleeves and ankle-length skirt. The bodice, whether high or low-necked, would be embroidered with beads, sequins and intricate insertions forming arabesques. When the women purchased the material, they would buy at the same time several belts and the scarf or shawl to go with it. Much care was also lavished on sequinned waistcoats to be worn for special occasions. On these Thursdays, they sewed in Arabic for an Arab fashion using Arab materials that were only worn by immigrant women from the Maghreb. Over the years, Sherazade and Meriem, who always managed to salvage scraps of the finest and most iridescent materials, had heard repeated hundred of times, on Thursdays then on feast days, the names of the materials which were scattered around the flat, until the moment when the husband came home; then everything vanished, with a speed which always astonished the two sisters, and the place was as tidy as if no one had been there all day. The women had worked, sewed, chatted, laughed, drunk the tea prepared by Meriem and Sherazade, mint tea. Sateen crêpe, muslin, bouclé, Champs-Elysée, Chadli material . . . Sherazade and Meriem knew exactly what each of these names suggested, the colours, the motifs, the ease in handling or the degree of transparency and even the style of the dress. For example, Chadli* material had been all the vogue at one time; supple and light, the material fell easily into great long petals each of which could form one panel of a skirt. They were familiar with the jewels worn on special occasions and knew that every woman, just like their mother who wore nearly all of them to show them off, would be carrying with her two to three million old francs' worth of gold jewellery.

  They looked forward excitedly to the luxury of those red-letter days when the women's songs and dances, and cries as well, allowed them to forget the dreary neutral grey of the other days, when they dressed Western fashion in a country where it nearly always rains.

  On Thursdays, in the women's apartments, preparations were made for the profusion of colours, the resplendence
of Arab festivities.

  On the Thursday when Meriem's mother had decided to make her an Arab dress in apple-green muslin for the wedding of a first cousin, her friends came to sew also for their daughters of marriageable age. The mothers worked faster and better than the daughters who preferred to read photo-romances which Meriem's mother found after the sewing afternoons and threw away immediately before one of her girls made off with them, which was known to occur. They had nothing else to read at home except the newspaper which their father brought back from work, usually France-Soir.

  Meriem's mother was telling a story when her daughter beckoned to her from the door. The mother indicated that this wasn't the moment to interrupt her for nothing and went on with the story and the dressmaking. She was oversewing the apple-green muslin that Meriem had climbed on the table to try on for the hem. A very skilled embroiderer, that all the mothers vied with each other to get for their daughters' trousseaux, was going to embroider the slightly décolleté bodice: green beads would form a sort of frieze like bunches of bottle-green grapes. She would use the same beads on the sash and around the edge of the head-scarf, also green, paler than the green of the dress but the same shade. Green, the women said among themselves, was the colour of Algeria.

  Meriem insisted. The other women mustn't see her. The mother decided to join her daughter in the kitchen; she said she was going to make fresh coffee, so as not to arouse suspicions. Meriem showed her mother the special envelope that didn't seem just to contain a letter. Several perhaps? The mother took out the cassette, turned it over without quite understanding. She was used to the cassettes of Arab songs that her sons often gave her, but this one intrigued her. She looked at Meriem.

  'Sherazade sent it . . .'

  The mother understood, put her arms round the daughter she hadn't lost and hugged her tightly as if she was hugging two at once, as she often used to do when they were small: they were the same size although Meriem was the older of the two girls. The mother hid the cassette in the pocket of her skirt, under the dress with the tiny floral pattern, and made fresh coffee for her friends. She knew they wouldn't leave before the usual time.

  'Patience,' she said to Meriem who would have liked to chase her mother's friends away immediately.

  But after the friends, there would be the father, the brothers, the little sisters, when would the two of them be able to listen to the cassette, hear Sherazade, if it was her speaking? There was no name on the cassette, but it had been sent to Anna-Maria, as arranged.

  Towards evening, when the little ones had been bathed and put to bed, and the sons and the father were in front of the telly, Meriem called her mother into the bathroom for a henna. No one would disturb them. The mother took the little tape-recorder, fingered the cassette in her pocket and they shut themselves in for Meriem's henna.

  It was Sherazade's voice.

  The mother stopped, a lock of hair in her left hand, the right one full of henna.

  Sherazade was talking. To her mother. To Meriem.

  The mother resumed her dyeing with her accustomed skill and wept as she listened to her daughter. The tears fell on to Meriem's hair and the henna flakes. Meriem did not weep. She said to her mother, 'Cry, Imma, cry if you want to.'

  Sherazade didn't say where she was or what she was doing. She talked like one writes a letter. Neither time or place mattered. She could have been talking the previous evening, or three months before, you couldn't tell.

  Sherazade's voice was calm, almost affectionate. She spoke about her father, her brothers, her little sisters, to her mother and sister who listened to her voice.

  When the henna was finished, Sherazade was sending kisses to them all. The mother said, 'My daughter is alive . . .'

  And she gave thanks to Allah.

  *Just as 'Champs-Elyséé' suggests the wealth and the smart shops of Paris, so 'Chadli' – the name of the President of the Algerian Republic – suggests something costly and superior, fit for a President's family. (Trans.)

  Châtelet

  Sherazade went out to post her letter to Driss but didn't come back that evening or all that night. Julien found a note like she often left, as she never phoned except to say I'm coming and then not very often . . . On a scrap tom off an envelope that Julien didn't discover till next morning, she'd written, 'I'm not an odalisque.' Most times she didn't sign. Shit, thought Julien and went to his computor. Fortunately the programme was complicated. He wouldn't think about Sherazade. He thought about her all day and Waited for her till evening.

  Sherazade took the Metro, without being sure where she was going. Every time she saw graffiti in Arabic script on a poster, she took out a Chinese notebook kept for the purpose, and carefully jotted down the words, the expressions she wasn't quite sure of, checked, after copying them, that she hadn't made a mistake, forgotten a sign or a curlicue. She noted which station, whether the advertisement was for a commercial product or a film, how far along the platform. She noticed more and more graffiti in Arabic script now she wanted to take them all down . . . Once she was carefully copying several lines in Arabic and when she got to the last one she saw written in roman capitals underneath the Arabic inscription – slogan? poem? song? insults? -UNKNOWN LANGUAGE . . . She couldn't understand these inscriptions until Julien managed to read and translate what she'd copied. In general, it was a question of political slogans against autocratic regimes in one or other of the Arab countries, slogans for the freeing of political prisoners arbitrarily detained, slogans for the defence of Human Rights everywhere in the world, for the Palestinians against the Israeli occupation . . .

  She'd got out at Châtelet station and before leaving she'd once again taken down some Arabic wording. She was closing her notebook when she heard shouts at the other end of the platform. A woman was screaming, 'Stop them! stop them!' Sherazade saw a crowd gather and was jostled by a squad of uniformed cops who arrived at the double. She immediately followed them, forgetting her usual caution; she was putting herself at risk. She got close to the group but couldn't see what was going on. From the comments she overheard, she realized two pickpockets had been caught red-handed by a small party of plain-clothes inspectors who'd been following them for several hours, from station to station . . . The inspectors had brought it off, if there were a few more like them, as keen and energetic, the Metro would be a safer place and you wouldn't be mugged by these hooligans who came in now direct from the suburbs on the RER and spent all day in the Metro corridors in central Paris, on the lookout for easy prey, women, old men, scared youngsters yes there were still some well brought-up children among this generation . . . And then if you kept them in prison longer but they were let out immediately, they weren't even recorded and when they did go to prison, they always got out quicker and quicker what's more soon the prisons'd be putting out red carpets to welcome them what with these reforms the new minister was preparing, the one who'd done away with capital punishment . . . Of course you wouldn't have insisted on the guillotine for them these young pickpockets like you wouldn't go as far as that but what you ought to do they ought to be sent back where they came from let them try that in their own country, they'd have their hands and ears cut off and maybe hanged in public, they'd see whether in France . . . Sherazade tried to make her way through these opinions of the French Metro users, and get closer. Why was she trying to see them? If the cops checked all the youngsters standing around she'd got her residence permit but what if the police had her description? She didn't think they would have. By what she'd managed to hear, the two lads were young immigrants. She thought, without putting her suspicions into words, that possibly Krim or Basile . . . They were the ones she was thinking of. She had to know for sure. The uniformed cops surrounded the inspectors who were putting the cuffs on the two lads. They were going up the escalator when Sherazade shouted, without thinking, 'Omar! Omar!'

  Omar turned round, recognized Sherazade and, lifting his hands held in the cuffs, shouted, 'We'll meet over there!'

  Om
ar was with one of his mates she'd already seen in the gang. He was a half-caste and like Basile wanted to go to Africa, to Senegal. His father was French, his mother Senegalese. Brought up in France in his father's family, he hadn't seen his mother for a long time. But he wasn't stealing to pay for his trip, he'd already got his ticket, he'd told her the last time they'd met. He'd even showed it to his pals.

  Omar and Martial had disappeared at the top of the escalator with the escort. A journalist who was accompanying the inspectors had taken a number of pictures of the lads.

  Sherazade just missed an identity check.

  She went up to the Halles Forum, with the crush on the escalators. She wanted to warn Zouzou and France who knew Omar and Martial well, but instead of leaving the Metro, she found herself on level four which led to the RER platforms for the suburban lines. She'd been following an Algerian family from the escalators on to the platforms, waiting for the train that the father, mother carrying a baby, and the five little girls had got into to leave.

  Sherazade had caught sight of a man in the distance, in his fifties, wearing a beige raincoat and black patent shoes, who was carefully carrying a big box of cakes, it must have held a dozen. He was holding the hand of a little girl of about two and a half whose other hand was held by her three- or four-year-old sister. The two older sisters walked behind the father, nine-year-old twins who chattered away without paying any attention to their sister who was waiting rather anxiously for the mother . . . The mother was a young woman in her thirties in a green pleated skirt and long acrylic jacket; she had a heavy baby asleep in her arms. She walked slowly and the father frequently turned round especially when they got to the escalators on to which the whole family had to be dragged all together, some of them laughing, some apprehensive. Sherazade was watching the box of cakes that she kept thinking was going to upset when the father picked up the smallest little girl to jump off at the end of the escalator.