Sherazade

by Leïla Sebbar

  When she came to pay, the hairdresser said she didn't owe him anything. She'd given him her hair.

  Sherazade continued to wear Basile's felt hat and occasionally the dark glasses that Krim lent her since he'd found two other pairs even more 'teriff'.

  Sherazade walked through the gallery, munching the rest of the chocolate. She glanced casually at the pictures, without pausing. She reached the foot of the escalator which leads to the fourth floor, where the permanent collections are housed. She went up and walked about on the floor. She found herself passing the same pictures, when she thought she'd got to the opposite end to the spot where she'd started. It must be nine o'clock. She'd plenty of time. She went on walking around. She stopped several times in front of the pictures: after a short time she found herself coming back to the same ones and realized that these pictures that she'd looked at a couple of times, apparently at random, were all portraits of women in various poses and attitudes, but nearly always reclining on a sofa or seated with a book, brunettes, or red-heads, with black or green eyes. Without following any exact order, Sherazade took out her red and black notebook and meticulously copied down the name of the artist, the title and date of each picture as they struck her untrained eye:

  Tamara de Lempicka

  Girl in Green (undated).

  Moise Kisling

  Woman in Polish Shawl, 1928.

  Suzanne Valadon

  The Blue Bedroom, 1923.

  Pierre Bonnard

  The Red Blouse, 1925.

  Woman at her Toilet, 1914.

  Picasso

  Woman in Grey, Reading, 1920.

  Otto Dix

  Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926.

  Fernand Léger

  Women in an Interior, 1921.

  Balthus

  The Turkish Room, 1963-1966.

  Matisse

  Woman Reading, against a Black Background, 1939.

  Sherazade wrote Matisse carefully, without thinking. She" looks at the picture again and on the label on the right she sees MATISSE. 'Shit! it's Matisse!. . .' She says it aloud, as if she were speaking to someone. She reads again: MATISSE; 'It's Matisse' . . . She looks round, turns the pages of her notebook, this is the first genuine one she's seen. She peers again at the woman reading, from close to. She finds nothing exceptional about her. She even thinks the drawing is a bit awkward. She feels her heart beating faster. That happened with The Women of Algiers. Sherazade retraces her steps, tries to proceed in order, doesn't succeed, begins again, looks carefully at each picture, because of Matisse, without yet knowing why Matisse.

  She's seen all the pictures in the end rooms and those in the middle, without their making any particular impression. She walks straight ahead, thinking she must have made a mistake . . . And then, right in front of her, she sees her, red on a red background. She comes closer, wondering why she hadn't noticed her before -it will soon be twelve o'clock. She is standing in front of the odalisque. First she reads:

  Henri Matisse

  Le Cateau Cambrésis 1869 – Nice 1954

  Odalisque in Red Trousers, 1922

  Purchased by the State, 1922

  Lux 085 P

  Before looking at the picture, she copies into her notebook everything she reads on the little metal plate.

  Sherazade is looking at The Odalisque in Red Trousers.

  She can't understand why it moves her. The reclining woman, with bare breasts, her arms draped in a light gauze behind her head, her hair half hidden by a muslin scarf embroidered with beads, has small round black eyes, a small mouth, almost a double chin – on account of her pose – Sherazade doesn't find her beautiful. The loose red trousers leave her navel exposed. The blouse has slipped to one side revealing her torso and belly. The red trousers are caught in at the calves by a sort of golden yellow band which picks up the colour of the flowers at the bottom of the trousers, yellow and green on the left leg which is folded under her on the almond-green and old-gold striped velvet sofa. The walls around the sofa are covered with tiles, decorated with yellow and red, blue and white, green and white arabesques. On a minute round table, on the right of the reclining odalisque, a vase with three red roses, rather frail. The floor is red, like the trousers.

  Sherazade stares at her until midday.

  She wrote the description of the odalisque in her notebook without any details, without stating that she thought this woman rather ugly but that she was nevertheless moved by her. She does not try to analyse why.

  Her mind is made up. Sherazade will go to Algeria. She no longer hesitates. She'll leave this evening with Pierrot if he's going in the Orleans direction, without Pierrot if he's staying in Paris.

  It is twelve o'clock.

  Sherazade stopped at the bookshop inside the art gallery and bought all the postcards of the Odalisque which remained on the stand. The assistant was astonished.

  'You're taking them all. You haven't made a mistake?'

  'No.'

  'You're sure? I charge you for the ten?'

  'Yes.'

  'What is it about her that appeals to you?'

  'I don't know.'

  'She's more beautiful in the original, don't you think?'

  'No.'

  The assistant held out to Sherazade the envelope with the odalisques.

  'Are you perhaps doing a study on Matisse?'

  'No, no.'

  'I'm curious.'

  'That's true. Goodbye.'

  The assistant smiled at Sherazade.

  Before she left the art gallery and the Centre, Sherazade sent an odalisque to her sister Meriem. She'd written, 'I'm leaving Paris this evening. Tell them not to look for me. I'm leaving for Algeria. I'm OK, I'll send news.'

  Julien

  Julien had barely given the door a push. He knew that Sherazade had gone. He'd bought kiwi-fruit, oysters and a passion-fruit sorbet. He'd spent the afternoon at the School of Oriental Languages, translating verses by an Arab woman poet. He wanted to use them as an epigraph for the film of which he'd written the script. They were to start shooting in a fortnight. He was coming to tell Sherazade.

  He rubbed the declarations of love off the window and the bathroom mirror.

  He went to bed early and unplugged the telephone. He fell asleep without dreaming of Sherazade.

  When he stripped his bed to remake it thoroughly, ten or fourteen days after Sherazade's departure, he found the note folded in eight under the pillow.

  He hadn't heard from her.

  Bagatelle

  When she left the art gallery, Sherazade ran all the way to the squat. Pierrot saw her arrive flushed and out of breath. She threw her bag down in the room and flopped into the red armchair. Pierrot followed her. He was alone.

  'You're leaving?'

  'Yes, I'm leaving. What about you? You said you'd phone on Thursday at twelve o'clock. That's tomorrow. I came back before, that's all.'

  'You want to leave today?'

  'Yes.'

  'What's the hurry? What's got into you? You decide like that, all of a sudden, it's today or never, at a moment's notice, without warning anyone beforehand, and you think people can drop everything for you?'

  'I didn't say that. I said I'm leaving today. If you're going in the Orleans direction, you can take me, if not I'll go by myself. I'm not forcing you to leave if you can't.'

  'Listen. I've just got back. I've settled everything up north, with the group, with Basile. I'm ready. But I wanted to hang about in Paris for a bit, for no particular reason. I haven't done that for a long time; walking in a garden or a park, it's fine today; I feel I'm living a subterranean existence, even if I don't really work underground, in the Metro or night watchman in the corridors. I feel like going to a quiet garden where they grow beautiful prize flowers for shows, Vincennes, the Bagatelle Gardens, you know them?'

  'No. What about Yasmine? You saw her?'

  'Yasmine. Yes, I saw her. She's married to a Moroccan, studying in Lille, I think. We went to
a café, it's the first time I've ever seen her in a café. We talked. She wants to train to be a youth organizer or probation officer. Her husband will help her. He doesn't insist on her staying at home. He isn't old, he's twenty-seven, the same as me. She seemed happy. I scarcely said a word. It was as if I'd never been in love with her. She was a different person. Her husband came and joined us in the café. We talked about Morocco, the political situation. I gathered he's not allowed to go back there, like a lot of militants who managed to escape from the repression there or who went into voluntary exile after several months in prison. He told me he was militating for the application of Human Rights in Morocco and everywhere where liberty and the rights of the individual are flouted; we didn't see eye to eye, I think his political stance is too soft; it's all right for the West, not for the Third World. You must answer violence with violence. I believe in popular violence. I think it's justified against autocratic violence and state violence. Yasmine's husband said he was going to set up a Committee for the North with some others and he'd be coming to Paris to confer with comrades on the paper Sans Frontière to see what joint action was possible. Yasmine will come with him. She's a militant too. Members of her family are in prison in Morocco. I didn't know. After all, we'd talked so little. I shan't see them in Paris. I shall be far away. You coming to Bagatelle? Afterwards we'll leave.'

  'Is Bagatelle far?'

  'Near the Bois de Boulogne. We'll get straight on to the motorway for Orleans. I've got everything ready. The car's parked down below. You'll see, it's a new one. I'm delighted with it. I've wanted one like it for a long time.'

  'You've bought it?'

  'There are ways and means . . . You'll see, you'll like it.'

  'Oh, you know, me and cars . . . I prefer bikes. I wanted to have a bike before I left. Krim promised me . . . He's still in Japan. Omar's in prison too. So, you see, I don't know when I'll get the bike . . . If I stayed . . . but I'm leaving.'

  'Shall we go?'

  Sherazade hadn't had time to see Zouzou and France before she left, so she wrote them a note on one of the postcards of the Odalisque. She told them she was leaving, possibly for a long time, but she'd send them plenty of messages through the independent radio stations and the personal columns of Libé or Sans Frontière which they'd been reading now and then, since they'd got to know Sherazade. At the end of the note she added, 'It's on account of her that I'm going.' Zouzou and France racked their brains over the meaning of this last sentence without managing to throw light on it. They pinned up the Odalisque on a board above their bed, with other postcards they received, one from Tunisia, the other from Martinique, in between palms and coconut trees, the Odalisque kept close company with the Caribbean and the South Seas.

  At the Bagatelle Gardens Pierrot and Sherazade chat as they walk. Pierrot pauses to read the names of the roses along the paths of the rose-garden. They have royal and aristocratic names he thinks this ridiculous, rather a scream, like a theatre set. The sit down for a moment in the green shelter overlooking the gardens. Pierrot talks about his mother. He's her only son; he told her he was leaving without mentioning his political mission; he gave her to believe he was spending a holiday in the South, he knew she didn't believe him but she didn't ask any questions. When he left, she kissed him affectionately, putting her arms round his neck to bend his face down to hers – he's much taller than her – and saying, 'Pierrot, you are my Pierrot,' like when he was a child, 'come back soon.' She gave him some money, a thousand francs; she knows he hasn't got much; she still does dressmaking at home for friends, neighbours, she's a good worker, she doesn't really need it to live on; she's saving up for a garden she wants to buy near the house and for Pierrot.

  Pierrot talks. Sherazade listens.

  They have a coffee on the terrace under the trees in the Bagatelle Gardens. It's quiet. They are almost alone at this time of the day. Pierrot has never given any details about his underground activities. Sherazade knows nothing except that he belongs to a secret organization and that he's got some undertaking with Basile who he has to meet in the South or somewhere, he didn't say where. Sherazade thinks it's something to do with arms-smuggling or a hold-up for the group which needs money, since, as Pierrot has always emphasized, they aren't financed by the KGB or the CIA or Libya or international Zionism . . . It doesn't occur to her it could be an Italian-style kidnapping still less a bomb attack. Before they left the squat a little time ago, Pierrot said to Sherazade, 'Open your hands and close your eyes.'

  'Why?'

  'It's a surprise . . .'

  As soon as Pierrot put it in her hand, before she opened her eyes, she guessed it was the .38.

  'Why are you giving me this? I don't need it. . .'

  'Neither do I.'

  'What am I supposed to do with it?'

  'I dunno. It may come in useful for someone walking through France like you . . .'

  'And if the cops stop me?'

  'They won't search you. Put it in your belt, under your T-shirt.'

  'Can I chuck it in a ditch when I'm fed up with it?'

  'Not on your life . . . A .38's very valuable. You don't realize.'

  'It bugs me a bit to have it.'

  'Keep it just the same.'

  'OK. Shall we go?'

  'Off we go, O, O, . . .'

  'You know that song?'

  "Course I know it. I've seen Pierrot le fou, you weren't borm so you think . . .'

  'I know it too . . . Julien often watches it.'

  'Who's Julien?'

  'A buddy.'

  'What's he do?'

  'Films, computers, Arabic . . .'

  'And you liked Pierrot le fou? 'Cause your generation don't understand a thing, it bores them stiff this film, the only thing they like is bloody silly whodunits with Delon and Belmondo, old squares hamming it up . . .'

  'I like it when the girl – her name's Marianne, I think – sings "ma ligne de chance . . . ma ligne de hanche . . ." and they dance in a pinewood. I also like the part when they're on an island with a parrot, they read all the time, any old thing, I've forgotten.'

  Pierrot had taken out the road map for the West and South-West to look up the B roads. He wanted to leave the motorway after Palaiseau, and from Etampes take a secondary road as far as Pithiviers. He'd go through Orleans to see the Loire and because of Joan of Arc, after all, a woman war leader . . . He asked Sherazade what she thought of Joan of Arc, she didn't think anything.

  'For the Loire, we'll go as far as Beaugency . . . Orleans, Beaugency, Notre-Dame-de-Cléry, Vendôme, Vendôme . . . it's like a counting-out rhyme.'

  Orleans

  On the grass, near the terrace of the café in the Bagatelle Gardens, Pierrot spread out the map of Western France and with Sherazade traced the yellow lines of the secondary roads: after Etampes, the D921 as far as Pithiviers, and if they wanted to go through Orleans, the D927 then the D97. After Orleans, where they wouldn't linger or just to have a sandwich with a beer or a Coke, he'd take the D951, going through Cléry in the direction of Beaugency, the D19 as far as the Loire which they'd follow to Tours on the D951 which became the D751 after Blois.

  Sherazade asked Pierrot the reason for all these detours. Pierrot, who didn't like Paris – he said so often enough – felt like wandering through France on the by-ways outside the capital, outside Paris, Paris wasn't France. He wanted trees, grass, hedges, streams, rivers, country lanes. That's what he was leaving a day earlier for, to dawdle, to go off the beaten track. In Paris, too, he was a wanderer, but without the freedom of narrow, deserted roads, these gravel roads which still exist and which he loved to drive down with a powerful car raising a cloud of yellow dust behind it. He would stop, get out, set off again, accelerate, braking suddenly with a viciousness that these country roads allowed.

  'You've got your walkman, I've got a radio in the car, it's fantastic. Besides, it's lovely weather. It's five o'clock. A good time to get out of Paris and drive like mad or at fifteen miles an hour.'

&n
bsp; Pierrot took Sherazade's arm, swung her with him round the clumps of trees in the gardens and ran with her to the car – a grey metallic BMW, a respectable middle-class car, it wouldn't occur to the police to stop him, he was neat, clean-shaven, nothing to find fault with, everything perfect – Pierrot examined Sherazade.

  'I'm looking at you to make sure you're not going to compromise me: I'm looking at you through the eyes of a cop: hair, a bit short at the sides, it's the fashion, everyone's used to it, the cops as well, white T-shirt you see them every -there, it'll do, discreet earrings . . . The scarf, you can keep that on . . . But be sure you don't wear your hat or your dark glasses . . . we'd never even get as far as the motorway . . .'

  'And if I feel like wearing them . . .?'

  'If you put them on, you leave by yourself, you can hitch, it's not difficult. Look at me, haven't you noticed? I've shaved off my moustache, when after all . . . I know you like wearing disguises, but if you want me to take you, felt hats and pimp's glasses are out . . . Neutral, nondescript . . . Even the leather jacket, you know, Perfecto style, stands out, so as long as the sun's shining you leave it on the back seat . . . cool, cool, no provocation . . . You understand . . . no bloody nonsense.'