Desert
Page 21
“Do you speak her language?”
“I don’t know,” says Lalla.
Lalla says a few words in Chleuh, and the young woman looks at her for a minute and then answers.
“Tell her that her papers aren’t in order, the authorization for the baby is missing.”
Lalla tries to translate the sentence. She thinks the young woman hasn’t understood, then all of a sudden she collapses and begins to weep. The policeman says a few more words, and the interpreter from the International Red Cross lifts the young woman to her feet as well as he can and guides her over to the back of the room, where there are two or three imitation leather armchairs.
Lalla is sad because she realizes that the young woman will have to take the boat back in the opposite direction with her sick baby. But she is too weary herself to think about it much, and she goes back to lean up against the wall next to her suitcase. At the other end of the room, high up on the wall, there is a clock with numbers inscribed on rotating flaps. Each minute, a flap turns with a sharp click. The people in the room aren’t talking anymore. They’re waiting, sitting on the floor, or standing against the wall, eyes fixed, faces tense, as if with each click, the door in the back is going to open and let them go.
Finally, after such a long time that no one is hoping for anything anymore, the men from the International Red Cross walk across the large room. They open the door in the back and start calling out the names of the children again. The muttering of voices resumes, the people crowd up near the exit. Lalla, carrying her cardboard suitcase, cranes out her neck to see over the heads of the others; she is so impatient for her name to be called that her legs begin to tremble. When the man from the Red Cross says her name, he sort of barks it out, and Lalla doesn’t understand. Then he repeats himself, shouting, “Hawa! Hawa ben Hawa!”
Lalla runs, her suitcase banging around at the end of her arm, and makes her way through the crowd. She stops in front of the door while the man checks her tag, then she leaps out, as if someone had shoved her from behind. There is so much light outside, after all those hours spent in the large gray room, that Lalla staggers, overcome with dizziness. She moves forward through the rows of women and men without seeing them, walks aimlessly straight ahead, until she feels someone taking her by the arm, hugging her, kissing her. Aamma pulls her over toward the exit from the wharves, toward the city.
Aamma lives alone in an apartment in the old town, near the port, on the top floor of a dilapidated house. There’s just a living room with a sofa, a dark bedroom with a folding bed, and a kitchen. The windows of the apartment open onto an inner courtyard, but you can see the sky pretty well above the tile roofs. In the morning, up until noon, there’s even a little sunshine that comes in through the two windows of the room with the sofa. Aamma tells Lalla that she was very lucky to have found the apartment, and also to have found work as a cook at the hospital cafeteria. When she arrived in Marseille, several months ago, she was first housed in a furnished apartment in the outskirts, where there were five women to each room, and the police came by every morning, and there were fights in the street. Two men even had a knife fight, and Aamma had to flee, leaving one of her suitcases behind, because she was afraid of being picked up by the police and deported.
Aamma seems quite happy to see Lalla, after all this time. She doesn’t ask her any questions about what happened when Lalla ran away into the desert with the Hartani and was later taken to the hospital in the city, because she was dying of thirst and fever. The Hartani had continued his journey southward alone, toward the caravans, because that was what he was always meant to do. Aamma has aged a lot in a few months’ time. She has a thin weary face, a gray complexion, and her eyes are ringed with dark circles. In the evening, when she gets home from work, she nibbles on cookies and drinks mint tea while she talks about her journey by car across Spain with other men and women who were going to look for work. They drove along the roads for days, passing through villages, over mountains, rivers. And one day, the driver of the car showed them a city with a lot of identical brick houses, with black roofs. He said, this is it, here we are. Aamma got out of the car along with the others, and, since the entire trip had been paid in advance, they took their belongings and started walking through the streets of the town. But when Aamma showed the envelope with the name and address of Naman’s brother, people started laughing and told her she wasn’t in Marseille, but Paris. So then she had to take the train and travel all night again before she got here.
When Lalla hears that story, it gives her a good laugh, because she can imagine the passengers of the car walking around in the streets of Paris thinking they were in Marseille.
This city is really big. Lalla never thought there could be so many people living in the same place. Ever since she got here, she has been spending her days walking around town, from north to south, and from east to west. She doesn’t know the names of the streets; she doesn’t know where she’s going. At times she walks along the wharves, looking at the silhouettes of the freighters; other times she walks up the main avenues, toward the center of town, or else she follows the labyrinth of narrow streets in the old town, climbs the stairways, going from square to square, from church to church, until she reaches the large esplanade from where you can see the fortified castle overlooking the sea. Or still other times, she’ll go sit on the benches in the parks and watch the pigeons walking round on the dusty paths. There are so many streets, so many houses, stores, windows, cars; it makes your head spin, and the noise and the smell of gasoline fumes are inebriating and give you a headache. Lalla doesn’t speak to anyone. Sometimes she sits on the steps of the churches, well hidden in her brown woolen coat, and watches the passersby. There are men who look at her, then stop on a street corner and pretend to be smoking a cigarette while they keep an eye on her. But Lalla knows how to disappear very quickly, she learned that from the Hartani; she goes across two or three streets, through a store, weaves around the stopped cars, and no one can follow her.
Aamma would like for her to work at the hospital with her, but Lalla is too young; you have to be eighteen. And also, it’s hard to find work.
A few days after she arrived, she went to see Old Naman’s brother, whose name is Asaph, but everyone calls him Joseph. He has a grocery store in Rue des Chapeliers, not far from the police station. He seemed happy to see Lalla, and he hugged her and talked about his brother, but Lalla was wary of him right away. He doesn’t look anything like Naman. He’s small, almost bald, with repulsive, bulging gray-green eyes, and a smile that augurs nothing good. When he learned that Lalla was looking for work, his eyes lit up, and he got nervous. He told Lalla that he just happened to need a young girl to help with the grocery store, putting things away, cleaning, and maybe even being in charge of the cash register. But as he was talking about all that, he was constantly staring at Lalla’s abdomen and breasts with his repulsive watery eyes, so she told him she would come back tomorrow, and left immediately. Since she didn’t go back, he came to Aamma’s place one evening. But Lalla went out as soon as she saw him, and took a long walk through the narrow streets of the old town, making herself as invisible as a shadow, until she was sure the grocer had gone back to his place.
This city is a strange land, with all of these people, because they don’t really pay any attention to you if you don’t show yourself. Lalla learned how to slip silently along the walls, up the stairways. She knows all the places where you can see without being seen, hiding places behind trees, in big parking lots filled with cars, in doorways, in vacant lots. Even in the middle of very straight avenues, where there is a constant flow of cars and people going up, going down, Lalla knows she can become invisible. In the beginning, she still bore the marks of the burning desert sun, and her long, black curly hair was full of sparkling sunshine. So people would look at her in surprise, as if she were from another planet. But now months have gone by, and Lalla has been transformed. She cut her hair short; it is dull, almost gray. In the shad
ows of the narrow streets, in the damp chill of Aamma’s apartment, Lalla’s skin has grown dull too; it’s become pale and gray. And then there’s the brown coat Aamma found in a Jewish thrift store, near the cathedral. It reaches almost down to her ankles, the sleeves are too long and the shoulders sag, and the best thing is that it’s made out of a sort of wool carpeting, worn and shiny with age, the color of city walls, of old paper; when Lalla puts on her coat, she really feels as if she becomes invisible.
Now she’s learned the names of the streets by listening to people talking. They’re strange names, so strange that sometimes she recites them under her breath as she’s walking along between the houses:
La Major
La Tourette
Place de Lenche
Rue du Petit-Puits
Place Vivaux
Place Sadi-Carnot
La Tarasque
Impasse des Muettes
Rue du Cheval
Cours Belsunce
There are so many streets, so many names! Each day, Lalla goes out before her aunt wakes up; she puts an old piece of bread in the pocket of her brown coat and starts walking, first making circles around the Panier neighborhood until she reaches the sea by way of the Rue de la Prison, with the sun lighting up the walls of the city hall. She sits down for a moment to watch the cars going by, but not for too long, because the police will come along and ask her what she’s doing there.
Then she continues going northward, walking up the wide, noisy avenues, La Canebière, Boulevard Dugommier, Boulevard Athènes. There are people from countries all over the world, who speak all sorts of languages; people who are very black with narrow eyes, wearing long, white robes and plastic slippers. There are people from the north, with light hair and pale eyes, soldiers, sailors, and also corpulent businessmen who walk briskly and carry around odd little black suitcases.
Lalla likes to sit down there too, in a doorway, to watch all of those people coming and going, walking, running. When there are a lot of people, no one pays any attention to her. Maybe they think she’s like them, that she’s waiting for someone, for something; or maybe they think she’s a beggar.
In crowded neighborhoods, there are lots of poor people, and those are the ones that Lalla watches most closely. She sees women in rags, very pale in spite of the sunshine, holding very small children by the hand. She sees old men, wearing long patched robes, drunks with blurry eyes, bums, foreigners who are hungry carrying cardboard suitcases and empty grocery bags. She sees children alone, faces grimy, hair disheveled, wearing old clothes too large for their scrawny bodies; they walk along quickly as if they were going somewhere, and their eyes are shifty and unpleasant like those of stray dogs. From her hiding place behind the parked cars, or else in the shadow of a carriage entrance, Lalla watches all of those people who look lost, who are walking along as if they were half asleep. There’s an odd gleam in her dark eyes as she watches them, and perhaps just at that moment, a bit of the great desert light falls upon them, but they hardly even feel it, not knowing where it’s coming from. They might get a slight shudder, but they walk quickly away, melt into the crowd of strangers.
On some days she goes out a very long way, walks for such a long time through the streets that her legs ache, and she has to sit down on the curb to rest. She walks eastward along the main avenue lined with trees, with a multitude of cars and trucks driving past, then crosses over hills and glens. In those neighborhoods, there are a good many vacant lots, buildings as tall as cliffs, entirely white, with thousands of small identical windows; farther out, there are villas surrounded with laurels and orange trees, with vicious dogs that run along the fence barking as loud as they can. There are also lots of stray cats, thin, ill-kempt, that live atop the walls and under parked cars.
Lalla keeps walking, aimlessly, following the roads. She crosses distant neighborhoods through which canals snake, swarming with mosquitoes; she goes into the cemetery, as large as a city, with its rows of gray stones and rusty crosses. She climbs up to the very top of the hills, so far away you can barely even glimpse the sea, like a dirty blue smudge between the cubes of the buildings. There is a strange haze floating over the city, a big gray, pink, and yellow cloud where the light pales. The sun is already going down in the west, and Lalla can feel weariness stealing over her body, sleepiness. She looks at the city glittering in the distance; she can hear it humming like a motor, trains rolling along, entering the black holes of the tunnels. She’s not afraid, and yet something is spinning inside of her, like a dizzy feeling, like a wind. Maybe it’s the chergui, the desert wind that is coming all the way over here, which has crossed the whole sea, the mountains, the cities, the roads, and is on its way? It’s hard to know. There are so many diVerent forces here, so many sounds, movements, and maybe the wind has gotten lost in the streets, on the stairways, on the esplanades.
Lalla is watching a plane lifting slowly into the pale sky, making a thundering sound. It veers up over the city, passing in front of the sun, blinking it out for a fraction of a second, and then flies off in the direction of the sea, growing smaller and smaller. Lalla stares at it very hard, until it is nothing more than an imperceptible dot. Maybe it’s going to fly out over the desert, over the expanses of sand and stones, out where the Hartani is walking?
So then Lalla goes off as well. Legs wobbling a little, she walks back down toward the city.
There’s something else that Lalla really likes to do: she goes to sit on the steps of the wide flight of stairs in front of the train station and watches the travelers going up and down. There are the ones who are arriving, all out of breath, eyes tired, hair mussed, and who go teetering down the stairs into the light. There are the ones who are leaving, who are in a hurry because they’re afraid of missing their trains; they run up the stairs two at a time, and their suitcases and bags knock against their legs, and their eyes are trained straight ahead on the entrance to the station. They stumble on the last steps, they call out to one another for fear of getting lost.
Lalla really likes hanging around the train station. It’s as if the big city wasn’t quite finished yet, as if there were still that large hole through which people keep coming and going. She often thinks that she would really like to go away, get on a train headed northward, with all of those names of lands that are intriguing and a little frightening, Irun, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, Lyon, Dijon, Paris, Calais. When she has a little money, Lalla goes into the station, buys a Coca-Cola at the refreshment stand and a platform ticket. She goes into the large departure hall, and wanders around on all the platforms in front of the trains that have just come in or that are leaving soon. Sometimes she even gets on one of the cars and sits down for a minute on the green moleskin seat. The people arrive one after the other and settle down in the compartment, they even ask, “Is it taken?” and Lalla gives a little shake of her head. Then when the loudspeaker announces that the train is going to leave, Lalla quickly gets off the car, jumps down onto the platform.
The train station is also one of the places where you can see without being seen, because there is too much agitation and hurriedness to pay much attention to anyone. There are all sorts of people in the station, cruel people, violent people with bright red faces, people who shout at the top of their lungs; there are very sad and very poor people too, old people who are lost, anxiously searching for the platforms their trains are leaving from, women with too many children who hobble along with their loads by the cars that are too high. There are all of the people that poverty has brought to this city, blacks who have come off boats, heading for the cold countries with their colorful short-sleeved shirts and a lone beach bag serving as luggage; dark-skinned North Africans, layered with old jackets, wearing ski caps or hats with ear flaps; the Turks, the Spaniards, the Greeks, all looking worried and weary, wandering around on the platforms in the wind, bumping into one another in the midst of the crowd of indifferent travelers and jeering soldiers.
Lalla watches them, just barely hidden bet
ween the telephone booth and the information board. She’s backed into the shadows pretty well, and her copper-colored face is shielded with the collar of her coat. But from time to time, her heart starts beating faster and a flash of light darts from her eyes, like the reflection of the sun off the stones in the desert. She watches all the people who are headed for other cities, for hunger, cold, misfortune, those who will be humiliated, who will live in solitude. They go by, stooping slightly, eyes blank, clothing already worn from nights of sleeping on the ground, like so many defeated soldiers.
They are headed for black cities, for low skies, for smokestacks, for the cold, the sickness that rips your chest apart. They’re headed for their shantytowns in muddy lots, down below the freeways, for rooms like graves dug into the ground, surrounded by high walls and fences. Maybe those men, those women, passing by like ghosts, dragging their bags and their too-heavy children, will never come back, maybe they’ll die in those countries they don’t even know, far from their villages, far from their families? They’re headed into those foreign countries that will take their lives, that will crush and devour them. Lalla is standing very still in her dark corner, and her vision blurs because that’s what she thinks. She would so like to go away from here, walk through the streets of the city until there were no more houses, no more gardens, not even any roads, or shoreline, just a path like before, that would lead out, growing ever narrower till it reached the desert.