Annette said, “Do you ever think of getting married?”
“Sometimes.” She thought of Simeon again, and the guilt returned. Did she love him? Had she ever loved anyone, was she capable of love? She was not sure. “You know what I’ve come to think, Annette? Two persons traveling separate roads meet and marry in order to continue together along a common road. So before you marry you have to know what road you want to follow for the rest of your life, and what road the other person—the husband or the wife—wants to follow. And you have to see whether you can follow the same road.”
Annette said, “I, the allegedly cold and cruel Annette, naturally think in this calculating way. But you always struck me as being a romantic type, Maria. So what about love?”
Maria flushed. “You must love, of course. But you must love somebody who follows the same road.”
“And if you happen to fall in love with somebody who is not going along your road?”
“Then one of the two must sacrifice.”
“Would you sacrifice?”
For the first time, she faced the question squarely. “I don’t think I could. I think I would wither up and die.”
She left Annette right after lunch and took a bus to Simeon’s apartment. He had left a note on his desk that he would be at the library. The talk with Annette had confused Maria and she was glad to be alone for a while. She undressed and went into the bathroom and ran a bath.
A role! The thought came insistently back to her. But was she less interested in acting than in being an actress? Fame, wealth, her name in lights—yes, but most important, that would mean becoming someone else, that person, that legend on the screen. Acting would mean a metamorphosis, it would wipe out the past, destroy memories. There would be no little Jewish girl named Maria whose body had been profaned by a monster in a concentration camp, no Maria who turned her eyes away as her parents went off to a horrible death. There would only be that person walking across a screen, living, loving and hating on the screen.
After bathing, she put on Simeon’s robe and slippers and went into the living room. She lay on the Moroccan blanket and looked through the window at the sky, thinking about Simeon. She saw him as tenderness in a world that was cruel and violent. Her body was in the power of his long, gentle hands. He was generous, intelligent, sensitive, but so complicated. Was it all because of his black skin? No, because she herself, a Jew with the horror in her past, made the effort to forget, made the effort to relax and enjoy life. The way he would brood—over a newspaper article, a talk with Babe, a mention of Ahmed. But this was a weakness, to brood passively rather than taking a positive and firm move, she thought.
She walked to the window, enjoying the pressure of Simeon’s robe against her skin. An African walked up the street. She lighted a cigarette, wondering why Simeon was taking so long. Then she remembered that she had to call the director.
“Vidal?” The director’s voice was excited as he told her the news. “Oh, that’s marvelous, Vidal! Yes, oh, yes, I can leave whenever you say.”
She hung up the phone, let out a cry, and whirled around the room. Italy! Italy! Then she halted abruptly, hearing the key in the lock. Simeon came in, tall and handsome, walking like someone who owned the world, a king or a prince. She smiled, remembering their first meeting.
“Hello, Baby.” He smiled in his usual disarming way. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“Simeon, the director just called. I’m having a big role in a film!”
“Maria!” She flew into his arms and he raised her in the air, swinging her around. “You’re a genius, I knew you’d make it.”
“I’m going to Italy!” she cried. “That’s where the film will be made.”
A shadow crossed his face, but Maria did not want to see it, did not want to stop sailing on a cloud of excitement. But she tried to contain her exhilaration.
“It won’t be for long, darling. A few weeks, a month at the most.”
Simeon made an effort, too, but there was a kind of resignation and finality in the way he sighed, even as he joked, “You behave in Italy!”
“Yes, I’ll behave. And I’ll write every day.”
She suddenly felt that they were playing games, that a decisive turning had come in their lives. But she did not want to think about it. Italy! And afterward London, Copenhagen, all over the world! To America even, to Hollywood.
V
1
THE VOICE sounded familiar, but at first Simeon did not believe his ears. He turned, startled to see Ahmed running down the street toward him. The two men rushed at each other, held one another at arm’s length, incredulous.
Simeon was shocked at the change in Ahmed’s physical appearance, or rather at the contrast between Ahmed’s appearance and his own. Ahmed’s bearing was more erect and proud, his skin was tanned, his once-delicate hands had become rough and calloused. His eyes had lost all their boyish shyness and shone with serene determination. Simeon felt like a sleepwalker next to Ahmed.
They walked to the Boulevard Saint-Germain and into a café where they ordered coffee.
“What brings you back to Paris, Ahmed?”
He smiled and put a finger on his lips. “An errand,” he said. “I won’t be here long. A couple of months. I wanted to see you. How is everyone? Babe, Benson, and the others?”
Ahmed’s glow of physical and psychological health seemed like an indictment to Simeon. “Everyone’s fine. Nothing has changed since you left, Ahmed. You walk into a café and continue a conversation you left off the day before.”
“The foreign colony is like that. It seems I’ve been away a long time. So many things happened in Algeria. The war’s almost over; De Gaulle wants to negotiate and we’ve won. I have thought of you a lot, Simeon.”
“Why?” Simeon asked, embarrassed under Ahmed’s intense gaze.
“We’re so much alike, Simeon, that with a change of circumstances you might have been in Algeria and me here. I tried to imagine what you were doing in Paris, and what I would be doing if I had been you.”
“What would you have been doing?”
“Going from café to café, as usual, I suppose.”
“That’s what I have been doing, and it’s not much of a life in the long run.”
“No.”
Ahmed asked, “Are you still with Maria?”
Was he? What had Kafka said—“The fox does not know that he is already dead as the hounds bay in their kennels?” He replied obliquely. “She’s in Italy making a film.”
“A movie? That’s wonderful. How is she?”
“I think she’s fine. I’m not sure. She rarely writes.”
Ahmed said nothing. After a moment he said, “Don’t let yourself rot away, Simeon.”
“Rot?” But Simeon knew what Ahmed meant.
“You know. ‘Drifting from café to café.’ I told you I thought about you a lot. I thought about myself—and we’re similar. I could have rotted away here in Paris; all I had to do was relax and let myself go. Sink into the opium dream. But I’ll tell you something. I was on a mountain in the Kabilya region with a group of guerrillas and the French came at us with helicopters and parachutists and we seemed lost, and I suddenly thought of the Paris cafés and I thought of you. I felt then: ‘I’ve never been happier in my life!’ You know that? Never happier. I was active, alive and felt I was happy for the first time in my life.”
Simeon sipped the coffee reflectively. “You were pushed into action,” he said. “Maybe I need to be pushed, too.”
“I know. But if no external push comes, you have to push yourself.”
Simeon said impatiently, “I can’t just go out and start a war, can I?”
“No. It doesn’t have to be a war.”
“I know.”
Ahmed grinned. “I told you, we’re twins.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got an appointment. Shall we have di
nner together tonight? With Henri and Lou, too, if you see them. Did you know that Henri is working with us?”
“Henri?”
Ahmed nodded. “With the FLN. We have a whole network of French people working with us. Not all of them are bastards.” He stood up. “Where shall we meet tonight?”
“At Marco’s?”
“Good. Eight o’clock.”
2
Walking along the street Simeon passed a newsstand and, with an automatic gesture, turned his face away from the headlines. He did not want to know what was happening, but he knew all the same. What was happening in Algeria, in France, in Angola, all over the world.
He went into the Danton Café. “A beer,” he told the waiter. A Frenchman sitting at a table next to him looked at his newspaper and shook his head, then looked at Simeon.
“The politicians should all be shot. They want to keep us on the brink of war, blow us up. I say, shoot them all.”
Simeon smiled. Politicians. He did not want to think about them, either.
He stared straight ahead and suddenly in his mind saw Maria, as he had first seen her, pounding her hips against the pinball machine. He imagined her staring into a mirror with her moody somber expression, or lying naked on the Moroccan blanket.
He went back to his apartment because there seemed to be no other place to go and found a letter from Maria. Like her others, it described the restaurants, the scenery, the clubs, the monuments. She was happy: she did not need to say it, it rang in her words. She wrote to him out of duty; she did not say it, he could sense it in the tone. Do it while you’re strong. The meeting with Ahmed had somehow given him strength. He sat at his desk and wrote:
Dear Maria:
I love you but you have a career and your own life to lead; I feel I have another kind of life before me, though I’m not sure what it will be yet. The two can’t mix. Dear baby, to make things easier I don’t want to see you when you return. I’m packing whatever things of yours are here and having them sent to your room. When you come back, don’t come to see me. And don’t answer this letter. Let things end like this. I know you understand what I’m talking about. I wish you all the luck in the world. I’m richer because I knew you. All my love.
Simeon
He felt numb as he folded and sealed the letter. He went downstairs to mail it before he changed his mind.
A few days later he received one short letter from Maria: “Darling. I cried when I read your letter. I don’t know what to say; I never felt as close to anyone as to you. But, if I am honest, I must say that I was beginning to feel the same thing. We can talk about this in Paris. I won’t come specially to see you, but we will run across each other. The film is almost finished and I will come back soon. Love. Maria.”
3
Simeon saw Ahmed almost every day. He did not want to think about Maria and dreaded her return. He doubted that, if he saw her, he would be able to resist rushing to her and taking her in his arms. He did not want to think about it. Ahmed would be his salvation.
“Come to dinner tomorrow at Ben Youssef’s place,” Ahmed said one day. “Two friends of mine, Algerian women, will be there. I’d like you to meet them.”
Their names were Djamila and Latifa, and they were the first Moslem women Simeon had ever met. They had dark skin and dark, faintly crinkly hair like the men. Djamila, the younger, was about nineteen; she was short and plump, with a sweet round face, merry eyes, and an unconquerable giggle. Latifa was tall and slender except for her stomach, which was inflated like that of a pregnant woman. She seemed more serious than Djamila. She was about twenty-five.
The women cooked the dinner, a thin peppery lamb stew with green vegetables. They drank apple cider and black coffee.
“I hadn’t met any other Moslem women in Paris,” Simeon said.
Ahmed said, “Djamila and Latifa are forbidden by the French to return to Algeria. They were just released from prison.”
Round-faced Djamila said gaily, “They arrested us for working with the FLN. They don’t want to let us back in Algeria because they’re afraid we’d start all over again.”
“Would you?”
“Of course,” she said with the infectious giggle.
The five of them sat around the table in Ben Youssef’s room, which was large but sparsely furnished. The two women had cooked the stew on an alcohol stove which they had placed in the unused bidet. Ahmed and Simeon sat on the bed, with Ben Youssef opposite them and the two girls at either end of the table. There was no paper on the splotched plaster walls and no carpet on the floor. Ben Youssef stared into space, seemingly detached from the conversation, which was in French.
Simeon said to the women, “What’s this you-you wail the papers all talk about, that the Algerian women make whenever there’s a demonstration?”
Ahmed replied for them. “It’s a sort of war cry. Before the war, it was a wail of greeting or of farewell.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
Djamila and Latifa looked at each other and burst into shy laughter. They blushed and shook their heads.
“Please. It fascinates me.”
Latifa put her hand over her mouth, to hide the double row of gold teeth, and said, laughing. “It’s not the right atmosphere. It wouldn’t be natural.” She glanced at Djamila again, then said, “We’ll wash the dishes. Maybe after that.”
They washed the dishes in Ben Youssef’s washstand, stacking them carefully on a shelf of the clothes closet. From time to time they looked at Simeon, then at each other, and burst into their shy laughter. It was clear that they had not often been in the company of men. They blushed whenever Simeon looked at them, and lowered their eyes. Yet, these were the most emancipated of Moslem women. They had participated actively in a war. They would never wear the veil again.
Suddenly, Djamila raised her head, closed her eyes and began a slow, eery, low-pitched wail that sounded like a series of you-you-you-you-you. Latifa suppressed her laughter, turned her back to the men to hide her embarrassment, and joined Djamila in the chilling cry. It rose steadily in pitch and became steadily more rapid, the girls rocking back and forth and rolling their heads. Their voices sent an icy shiver through Simeon. They broke off abruptly on a very high note, the highest they could reach. Then they burst into laughter again, hiding their faces.
Simeon whistled. “It’s bloodcurdling.”
“It’s to give the men courage,” Ahmed said.
Djamila’s face lighted. “The parachutists hate it. They can’t stand the you-you cry, it frightens them. When they come into our neighborhoods and we make the cry they turn pale and point their guns at us and say they will shoot if we don’t stop. But we don’t stop. And sometimes they shoot.”
They sat down again. There was a moment of silence, then Simeon asked Djamila, “Are you married?”
“No. I’m engaged. My parents made the engagement agreement with the parents of my fiancé when he was thirteen years old and I was nine. That was the way engagements were made in Algeria before the Revolution.”
“And now?”
“Now, we have the right to choose our own husbands and wives, out of love.” She laughed merrily. “I was lucky, I fell in love with my own fiancé. We will be married after the war.”
“Where is he now?”
“In prison.”
Latifa, turning her grave eyes on Simeon, interjected: “All of the young men are in prison or in the guerrilla forces.”
“And you, Latifa? Were you also given a fiancé when you were a child?”
“Yes. He was killed two years ago.” She thought a moment, then corrected: “All of the young men are in prison or in the guerrillas or dead.”
Ahmed’s face set. “One million dead. Out of a population of nine million. Can you imagine it? More than the French or the Americans lost in World War Two.”
Latifa nod
ded slowly. “And the wounded and missing. And the tortured.”
Djamila shrugged. “Oh, the torture. Practically everybody’s been tortured. Not even worth talking about.”
“It’s worth talking about,” Latifa said, raising her hand almost automatically to cover her gold teeth. “That and the rape.”
Ahmed spoke gently, coaxingly, knowing he was touching on a delicate subject. “Tell Simeon about the tortures.”
“No!” Latifa said. Neither of the women was smiling now.
“He must know what’s happening in Algeria, Latifa. Everybody should know.”
“No. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to think about it.”
Ahmed patted Latifa’s arm. He turned to Simeon and said, “You should know it. Everybody should know it. Latifa was caught smuggling guns for the FLN. She was raped, of course. But the French officers wanted information about the FLN; they wanted her to betray other members of the FLN, and they tortured her when she refused to answer her questions.”
Latifa was pale, staring fixedly at the table. Suddenly she rose, bowed shyly, and ran from the room. Djamila bowed, blushed and followed her. Ahmed explained: “They don’t want to be present while I tell you.” Then he continued: “They began with the bathtub. They put her in a bathtub filled with soapy water, pushed her head under water until she almost drowned, pulled her out and brought her to. Repeated this about ten times. Then they gave her the hot-and-cold-water treatment, filling the tub with ice-cold water and then scalding-hot water, alternating several times.
“She still didn’t talk, so the next day they undressed her again and lay her on her stomach on a cold stone floor and tied her hands behind her. Then two parachutists lifted her from the floor to the level of their waists, one holding her by her feet and the other by her hair. They told her to talk. She refused. So the man holding her hair let go. Her face smashed downward onto the stone floor, her teeth and nose were smashed, her lips were cut to hamburger. The man lifted her by the hair again. ‘Talk,’ he said. She spat blood into his face. He let go of her head and her face smashed down again.
The Stone Face Page 17