In the Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  The old woman climbed the stairs, muttering bitter insults. Her sons were going to kill her! How had she offended Allah, what crimes had she committed to deserve those two sons who lived in her house? Jalil was possessed by demons and Omar had always caused her so much anxiety. Before the war he’d gone to a school in the new town where Kadour had managed to get him a place thanks to the intervention of a European friend. But with his father dead and his brother at war, Omar had no longer been held accountable for his actions. Several times he’d returned to Berrima with his face bloodied, his lips swollen. He’d liked fighting and carried a knife in his pocket. A fatherless son is a danger to all those around him, Mouilala had thought then. For several weeks he’d hidden from his mother the fact that he’d been expelled from school, and then she’d found out from a neighbor that Omar had arrived in class with a newspaper under his arm, yelling triumphantly: “The Germans have taken Paris! That Hitler is a great man!” At the time, Mouilala had sworn that she would tell Amine everything when he returned from the war.

  Omar was as handsome as his older brother but he had a stranger appearance: an angular face, high cheekbones, thin lips, and thick brown hair. Above all he was much taller and the expression on his face was always so serious, so mean, that people often believed he was older than he really was. He’d worn glasses since the age of twelve, but despite being thick the lenses were not very effective, and that myopic look gave the impression that he was lost, that he was about to reach out and ask for help. That look frightened Aïcha. It was like being close to an animal that was starving or had just been beaten.

  He would never have admitted it publicly, but during the war years Omar was glad that his older brother was absent. He often dreamed of Amine’s corpse, ripped to pieces by a shell, rotting at the bottom of a trench. All he knew about war was what his own father had told him. The gas, the ditches full of rats and mud. He didn’t know that war wasn’t like that anymore. Amine survived. Worse, he returned a hero, his chest weighed down by medals, his mouth full of wonderful stories. In 1940 Amine was taken prisoner and Omar had to pretend to be worried, upset. In 1943 he came home and Omar feigned relief, then admiration when his elder brother decided to return to the front as a volunteer. How many times had Omar had to listen to the stories of his brother’s heroism, the escape from the camp and through icy fields where a poor farmer pretended that Amine was his employee? How many times had he had to laugh as Amine acted out his journey in a coal wagon and described the prostitute in Paris who gave him shelter? When his brother made a spectacle of himself, Omar smiled. He patted him on the shoulder and said: “Spoken like a true Belhaj!” But it killed him to see girls hanging on his every word, licking their lips, giggling, and wishing they could be taken by a war hero.

  Omar hated his brother as much as he hated France. The war had been his vengeance, his moment of grace. He’d pinned so much hope on that conflict, imagining that he would be freed twice over. His brother would be killed and France would be defeated. In 1940, after the surrender, Omar took great delight in showing his contempt toward anyone who showed the slightest obsequiousness toward French people. He took pleasure in shoving past them in lines for the shops, spitting on the ladies’ shoes. In the European town, he insulted the servants, caretakers, and gardeners as they lowered their eyes and handed their work certificates to the French policemen who threatened them: “As soon as your shift is over, you get out of here, understand?” He called on them to revolt, pointing at the signs on buildings forbidding natives to use the elevators or go swimming.

  Omar cursed this town, this rancid and conformist society, these colonists and soldiers, these farmers and students who were convinced that they were living in paradise. For Omar, lust for life went hand in hand with an appetite for destruction. He wanted to destroy the lies, smash the images, melt down the language, and forge from it all a new order, with himself as one of the masters. In 1942, during the “year of vouchers,” Omar had to survive on meager rations. While Amine was a prisoner of war, Omar raged at being trapped in such a trivial battle. He knew that the French were entitled to twice as much as Moroccans. He’d heard that the natives didn’t receive chocolate because it wasn’t part of their usual diet. He made a few contacts among the black marketeers and offered to help them sell off their goods. Mouilala asked no questions about the origin of the dead chickens that Omar proudly tossed onto the kitchen countertop, or about the sugar or the coffee. She shook her head and sometimes even looked annoyed. This drove her son mad. The ingratitude killed him. Was this food too good for her? Couldn’t she at least say thank you, given that he was feeding her, his sister, his crazy brother, and that greedy slave? No, his mother cared only about Amine and that little idiot Selma. No matter what he did for his family or for his country, Omar felt misunderstood.

  * * *

  —

  By the end of the war he had many friends in the secret organizations formed to overthrow French occupation. To start with, their leaders were reluctant to give him any responsibilities. They distrusted this impulsive boy, who was too impatient to listen to speeches on women’s emancipation and who barked out his demand for armed conflict. “Now! What are we waiting for?” Omar roughly pushed away the newspapers that his leaders encouraged him to read. Once, he lost his temper with a scarred Spaniard who had fought against Franco and claimed he was a communist. The man, who’d called for a proletarian uprising, was in favor of independence for all peoples. Omar insulted him, called him an infidel, mocked him for his fine speeches, and said—as he always did—that actions spoke louder than words.

  His faults were compensated by an unshakable loyalty and physical courage that ultimately won over the cell’s leaders. More and more often, he would disappear from the house for a few days or even a week. Mouilala had never told him this, but she was sick with worry whenever he went away. She got out of bed as soon as she heard the creak of the front door. She would blame poor Yasmine, then end up weeping in the slave’s arms despite the repulsion she felt for her black skin. She spent whole nights praying and imagining that her son was in prison or that he’d been killed over some girl or politics. But he always came back, his eyes and ideas hardened by what he’d seen.

  * * *

  —

  That evening, Omar had told his mother that there would be a meeting in her house and made her swear not to tell Amine. At first Mouilala had refused; she didn’t want any trouble in her home, she refused to hide weapons inside these walls built by Kadour Belhaj himself. She wasn’t interested in Omar’s speeches about nationalism. He almost spat on the ground and told her: “But when your son was fighting for the French, you were happy.” But he controlled himself and begged her instead, swallowing his shame and kissing her papery hands. “I can’t lose face. We’re Muslims! We’re nationalists. Long live Sidna Mohammed Ben Youssef!”

  Mouilala was touchingly deferential toward the sultan. Mohammed Ben Youssef had a special place in her heart, all the more so since his exile. Like the other women, she would go up to the roof terrace at night to see the sovereign’s face in the moon. She had been unhappy when Mathilde laughed at her tearful reaction to Sidna Mohammed’s exile to the country of Madame Gascar. It was clear that her daughter-in-law hadn’t believed her when she described how, upon his arrival on that strange island full of negroes, the elephants and tigers had prostrated themselves before the sultan and his family. Mohammed had performed a miracle in the airplane that took him to that cursed island. He and his family had almost crashed when one of the engines failed, but the sultan had placed his handkerchief on the fuselage and the plane had reached its destination without further difficulty. When she thought about the sultan and the Prophet, Mouilala finally gave in to her son’s demands. She rushed upstairs so she wouldn’t see those men coming into her house. Omar followed her and when he saw Aïcha, sitting on a step, he shoved her.

  “You, move! Go on, get out of here. Don’t just sit the
re like a bag of smid! You understand Arabic, nassrania? Semolina, your mother would call it. Now don’t let me catch you spying on me again, you hear me?”

  He raised his arm and showed her the palm of his hand and Aïcha thought that he could crush her against a wall, like those big green flies that Selma killed with her fingernails. Aïcha hurtled upstairs and slammed her bedroom door behind her, her forehead covered with sweat.

  ON OCTOBER 3, 1954, Mathilde had flown to Le Bourget airport in Paris, and from there, in a smaller plane, to Mulhouse. The journey seemed interminable because she was so eager to pour out her anger at Irène. How dare her sister keep her away from her dying father? She’d taken Georges hostage, hoarding Papa’s love for herself and covering his forehead with hypocritical kisses. In the plane Mathilde wept as she thought about her father calling for her and Irène lying to him. She imagined the words she would use, the things she would do once she was face-to-face with her sister. She relived one of those childhood scenes when Irène had goaded her into a rage and then laughed and called out: “Papa, come and see. Little Mathilde looks like she’s possessed!”

  But when she landed in Mulhouse and a cool wind caressed her face, all her anger evaporated. Mathilde looked around like someone in a dream, half afraid that if she made a single wrong move, said a single wrong word, the entire landscape would dissolve before her eyes. As she handed her passport to the customs officer, she longed to tell him that she was from Mulhouse, that she was coming home. His Alsatian accent was so charming that she wanted to kiss him on both cheeks. Irène was waiting for her, thin and pale in her elegant mourning dress. She gently waved her black-gloved hand and Mathilde walked toward her. Irène looked older. She was wearing big glasses now, which made her look harsh and masculine. Just below her right nostril a few thick white hairs grew from a mole. She kissed Mathilde with such tenderness that Mathilde hardly recognized her. She thought about how they were orphans now, and this thought made her cry.

  Mathilde was silent during the car journey to the house. The emotion of her return was so powerful that she was afraid of expressing what she was feeling and awakening her sister’s cruel irony. The country she had left behind had rebuilt itself without her; the people she’d known had moved on. Her vanity was a little hurt by the idea that her absence had not prevented the lilacs from flowering or the square from being paved. Irène parked in the little side street opposite the house where they’d grown up. Mathilde, standing on the pavement, let her eyes linger over the garden where she’d spent so many hours playing and then looked up to see the office window where she’d so often glimpsed her father’s imposing profile. Her heart stopped and she turned pale; she couldn’t tell if it was the familiarity of the place that seemed so overpowering or quite the opposite: a disturbing sense of strangeness. As if by coming here she had moved not only through space but through time as well, back into the depths of the past.

  In the first few days she had many visitors. She spent her afternoons drinking tea and eating cakes and after a week she’d regained all the weight she’d lost while bedridden with malaria. Some of her former classmates had children and others were pregnant; most had been transformed into domineering wives who complained about their husbands’ fondness for the bottle or for easy women. They ate cherries soaked in eau de vie and gave them to their children too, staining their little mouths red and eventually sending them to sleep on the sofa in the entrance hall. Joséphine, who’d been her best friend in school and who now drank too much schnapps, told Mathilde how she’d found her husband with a woman one afternoon when she was supposed to be visiting her parents. “They were doing it in my bed!” Her friends came because they wanted to find out if Mathilde’s life was as disappointing as theirs had turned out to be. They wished to know if she too had experienced the wretched futility of married life, with its heavy silences, its loveless sex.

  One afternoon a storm broke and the young women sat closer to the fireplace. Irène was growing somewhat weary of her sister’s relentless vanity parade. But Mathilde had looked so grief-stricken kneeling in front of their father’s gravestone that she couldn’t refuse such innocent distractions. “Tell us about life in Africa! You lucky duck—we’ve never even been out of the country.”

  “Well, it’s not as exotic as all that, really,” Mathilde simpered. “To start with, of course, you feel like you’ve landed on another planet, but soon after that you have to deal with all the mundane chores—and they’re the same in Morocco as anywhere else.”

  She could tell that they were hungry for more detail and she enjoyed the anticipation that she read in the eyes of these housewives who looked so much older than her. Mathilde lied. She lied about her life, about her husband’s personality, she gave rambling speeches punctuated by high-pitched laughter. She kept repeating that her husband was a modern man, an agricultural genius who single-handedly ran an immense farm. She talked about “her” patients and described the clinic where she performed miracles, concealing from them her lack of knowledge or resources.

  The next day Irène ushered Mathilde into their father’s office and handed her an envelope. “This is part of your inheritance.” Mathilde didn’t dare open it, but she hefted the envelope’s thickness and had to force herself not to smile with joy. “You know Papa wasn’t a very prudent businessman. When I went through his account books I discovered certain aberrations. We’ll go to see the notary in a few days so he can clear that up and you can go back to Morocco with peace of mind.” Mathilde had been in Alsace for almost three weeks now and Irène kept mentioning her departure with increasing frequency. She asked if Mathilde had booked her flight yet, if she’d received a letter from her husband, who she imagined was desperate to see her again. But Mathilde turned a deaf ear to her sister’s insinuations and managed to insulate herself from the thought that she had a life elsewhere, that people were waiting for her return.

  She left the office, envelope in hand, and told her sister that she was going to town. “I have some shopping to do before I go back.” She ran onto the main street as into the arms of a lover. She was shaking with excitement and had to take two deep breaths before entering an elegant shop run by a man named Auguste. She tried on two dresses, one black and one mauve, and it took her a long time to decide between them. She bought the mauve dress but left the boutique in a dark mood, irritated at having had to choose and already wishing she’d bought the black dress, which made her look thinner. On the way home she swung her shopping bag like a little girl returning from school and daydreaming about throwing her schoolbooks in a ditch. In the shop window of the most elegant milliner’s in town she caught sight of a wide-brimmed straw hat from Italy, decorated with a red ribbon. Mathilde climbed the steps that led to the front door and a salesman opened it for her. He was elderly and rather affected; a queer, thought Mathilde, who was disappointed by the shop’s sad-looking interior.

  “How may I help you, madame?”

  Without a word she pointed at the hat with the ribbon.

  “Of course.”

  The man glided along the floorboards and slowly extricated the hat from its window display. Mathilde tried it on and when she saw herself in the mirror she felt startled. She looked like a woman, a real woman, a sophisticated Parisienne, a member of the bourgeoisie. She thought about her sister, who always said that vanity was the devil’s domain and that it was sinful to admire oneself in a mirror. The salesman paid her a halfhearted compliment then seemed to grow impatient because Mathilde kept adjusting the hat, moving it an inch to the right and then to the left. For a long time she stared at the price on the label, before drifting into a deep, complicated series of thoughts. A man came into the boutique and the salesman held out his hand for the hat, looking annoyed.

  The man walked up to Mathilde and said: “Beautiful.”

  She blushed and took off the hat, which she then moved slowly over her chest, unaware of how sensual and flirtatious she looked.

/>   “You, mademoiselle, are not from around here. I would bet that you’re an artist. Am I right?”

  “Absolutely,” she replied. “I work at the theater. I’ve just been hired for the season.”

  She headed toward the counter and took the envelope of cash from her bag. While the salesman packaged up the hat with incredible slowness, Mathilde answered the young man’s questions. He was wearing an elegant overcoat and a khaki felt hat that half concealed his eyes. She dug herself deeper into the lie, with a mixture of shame and excitement. The salesman crossed the room and, standing by the glass door, handed the package to Mathilde. When the man in the overcoat asked if he could see her again, she replied: “Unfortunately I’m very busy with rehearsals. But you must come and see me perform one night.”

  * * *

  —

  When she arrived at the house she felt ashamed of all the packages she was carrying. She walked quickly through the living room and locked herself in her bedroom, her face flushed with happiness. She took a bath and moved the gramophone from her father’s office to her bedside table. She’d been invited to a party that evening and as she got ready she listened to an old German song that Georges had loved.

  At the party the women complimented her on her mauve dress and the men stared, smiling, at her smooth silk stockings. She drank sparkling wine so dry that, after an hour, her mouth was like a desert and she had to drink more in order to keep talking. Everyone asked about her African life and they kept getting Morocco mixed up with Algeria. “So you speak Arabic?” asked one charming man. She downed the glass of red wine that someone had handed her and spoke a sentence in Arabic that drew thunderous applause.