In the Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  “Hello, Sidi! I’m sorry to disturb you. Your maid let me in.”

  The house’s owner remained silent.

  “My name is Amine Belhaj. Once again, I apologize for bothering you at home. I’ve come in search of my brother, Omar Belhaj. I know that your son and he are friends and I thought perhaps that I might find him here. I’ve looked everywhere for him and my mother is sick with worry.”

  “Omar . . . Yes, of course, I see the resemblance now. You fought on the front in 1940, didn’t you? I’m sorry, but your brother isn’t here. My son, Otmane, was expelled from school and is now studying in Azrou. It’s been a long time since he saw your brother, you know.”

  Amine couldn’t hide his disappointment. He dug his hands into his pockets and said nothing. “Please, sit down,” said the man, and at that moment the young maid returned and placed a teapot on the copper table.

  Hadj Karim was a wealthy businessman. He ran a firm that advised clients on property purchases and investments. He had one employee and a typewriter, and his judgment was trusted in his neighborhood and beyond. In Fez and throughout the surrounding region people sought out the protection of this influential man, who was close to the nationalist parties but also had many European friends. Every other year he would go to Châtel-Guyon to be treated for his asthma and eczema. He loved wine, listened to German music, and had decorated his riad with nineteenth-century furniture bought from a former British ambassador. He was an elusive man, suspected by some of being an intelligence officer for the French authorities and by others of being a high-ranking accomplice of the Moroccan nationalists.

  “I worked for the French in the 1930s,” he told Amine. “I wrote contracts, did some legal translation. I was an honest employee and they had no reason to reproach me, thanks be to God. And then, in 1944, I supported the independence manifesto and took part in the uprisings. The French fired me and that was when I opened my own office as a certified defense lawyer specializing in Moroccan law. Who says we need them, eh?” Hadj Karim’s expression darkened. “Others weren’t as lucky as me. Some of my friends were exiled to Tafilalt, others were tortured by sadists who stubbed out cigarettes on their backs, tried to drive them insane. What could I do? I did my best to help my friends. I organized fundraisers to pay for the defense of political prisoners. One day I went to court, hoping to help a young man who’d been accused of a crime or just to offer support to a father devastated by the cruelty of a verdict. Outside the building I saw a man sitting on the ground and shouting out a word that I didn’t understand. I went over to him and saw, carefully laid out on a cloth, three or four ties. The vendor thought he’d spotted a customer and he tried to sell me one, but I told him I wasn’t interested and went on toward the court. There was a crowd of people gathered around the entrance. Men praying, women scratching at their faces and invoking the name of the Prophet. Believe me, Si Belhaj, I can remember the face of each and every one of them. Fathers, humiliated by their own powerlessness, handing me documents that they couldn’t read. They looked at me imploringly and told the women to move out of the way and shut up, but a tearful mother doesn’t listen to anyone. When I finally made it to the entrance I introduced myself and presented my credentials as a lawyer, but the doorman was categorical: I couldn’t go in if I wasn’t wearing a tie. I found this hard to believe. Hurt and embarrassed, I went back to the vendor sitting cross-legged on the ground and picked up a blue tie. I paid for it without uttering a word and tied it over my djellaba. I would have felt ridiculous had I not seen, on the steps leading up to the courtroom, several anxious fathers, the hoods of their djellabas lifted up, each one with a tie around his neck.” The man sipped his tea. Amine slowly nodded. “I am like all those fathers, Si Belhaj. I’m proud to have a nationalist son. I’m proud of all those sons who rise up against the occupiers, who punish traitors, who struggle to end an unjust occupation. But how many murders will it take? How many men must go before the firing squad before our cause triumphs? Otmane is in Azrou, far from all of that. He must study so he is ready to lead this country when it becomes independent. Find your brother. Search everywhere for him. If he’s in Rabat, or Casablanca, take him home. I admire all those people who sincerely accept the martyrdom of their loved ones. But I understand even better those who will do anything to save them.”

  Night was falling now and the servants lit candelabras on the patio. Amine noticed a beautiful wooden clock on a shelf; it was French-made and the gilt face shone in the gloom. Hadj Karim insisted on walking Amine to the gates of the medina, where his car was parked. Before leaving him Hadj Karim promised to ask around and to let him know as soon as he heard anything. “I have friends. Don’t worry, someone will talk.”

  On the way home Amine couldn’t stop thinking about what the lawyer had told him. It occurred to him that perhaps he lived too far from everything, that his isolation had made him guilty in some way, had blinded him. Like the coward that he was, he’d hidden away in the hope that nobody would find him. Amine had been born among these men, he belonged to this people, but he had never felt any pride in that fact. On the contrary, he’d often wanted to reassure the Europeans he met. He’d tried to convince them that he was different, that he wasn’t a liar or a superstitious fool or a lazy bastard, as the colonists liked to describe their Moroccan workers. He lived his life in accordance with the image, engraved deep in his heart, that French people had of him. As a teenager he’d gotten into the habit of walking slowly, head lowered. He knew that his dark skin, his stocky physique, his broad shoulders made him suspicious in the eyes of white people, so he shoved his hands into his armpits like a man who has sworn not to fight. Now it seemed to him that he lived in a world populated entirely by enemies.

  He envied his brother’s fanaticism, his ability to belong. He wished that he didn’t believe in moderation, didn’t fear death. In moments of danger he always thought of his wife and his mother and he felt obliged to survive. In Germany, in the POW camp, his fellow prisoners had offered to let him in on their escape plans. They’d studied the options open to them in great detail. They’d stolen scissors to cut the barbed wire; they’d gathered a few provisions. For weeks Amine kept finding excuses not to put the plan into action. “It’s too dark,” he told them. “Let’s wait for a full moon.” “It’s too cold, we’ll never survive in those freezing forests. Let’s wait until the weather improves.” The men trusted him, or perhaps they heard, in these cautious words, the echo of their own fears. Two seasons passed, two seasons of delays and a guilty conscience, two seasons spent pretending to be eager to escape. Of course, he was obsessed by the idea of freedom—it infiltrated all his dreams—but he couldn’t resign himself to the possibility of being shot in the back, of getting snagged on barbed wire and dying like a dog.

  For Selma, Omar’s disappearance marked the beginning of a time of happiness and freedom. Now there was nobody watching her, worrying about her absences, her lies. All through adolescence she’d taken a sort of mean pride in her bruised calves, her swollen cheeks, her black eyes. To her friends, who refused to follow her in her wild excursions, she always said: “Why not enjoy life? You’ll get beaten anyway.” To go to the movies she wrapped herself in a haik, out of fear that someone would recognize her, and once inside the darkened room she let men caress her bare legs and told herself: This is so much happiness that they can’t take away from me. Omar would often be waiting for her on the patio and, watched by Mouilala, he would beat her until she bled. One evening, when she was still only fourteen, Selma had come home late from school and, when she’d knocked at the door of the house in Berrima, Omar had refused to open it. It was winter, so night had fallen early. She’d sworn that she’d been kept behind for private study, that she’d done nothing wrong. She’d invoked Allah and His mercy. Behind the hobnailed door she’d heard Yasmine begging Omar to forgive his sister. But Omar had held firm and Selma had spent the night in the garden next door, shivering with cold and fear as she la
y in the wet grass.

  She hated that brother of hers, who wouldn’t let her do anything, who called her a whore and had on several occasions spat in her face. A thousand times she had wished him dead and cursed Allah for making her live under the reign of such a brutal man. He laughed at his sister’s desires for freedom. “My friends, my friends,” he mimicked her in a bitter voice whenever she asked permission to visit another girl. “All you care about is having fun!” Then he would pick her up by the collar, press his face against hers, savor the fear in her eyes, the trembling of her limbs, and smash her head against a wall or throw her down the stairs.

  With Omar gone and Amine too busy on the farm to visit very often, Selma was free. She lived like a tightrope walker, aware that her liberty would not last long and that soon, like most girls her age in Berrima, she wouldn’t even be able to go up on the roof terrace any more, because of her swollen belly and her jealous husband. At the hammam the other women would stare at her body and some would caress her hips. Once, the masseuse put her hand between Selma’s thighs with a certain brutality and said: “He’ll be a lucky guy, your husband.” The touch of that oily hand, those black fingers strong from kneading other bodies, was overpowering. Selma realized that there was something unquenched inside her, something insatiable, a chasm waiting to be filled, and alone in her bedroom she did to herself what that woman had done to her, feeling no shame but no satisfaction either. Men came to ask for her hand in marriage. They sat in the living room while she crouched on the stairs, anxiously watching those middle-aged, potbellied suitors slurp their tea and pretend to hawk up phlegm to scare off the prowling cats. Mouilala let each one in excitedly, and listened to his questions, and when she realized that he had not come about her son, that he knew nothing of what had happened to Omar, she stood up and left, and the man would remain where he was for a few minutes, in a daze, before leaving this madhouse without a backward glance. Selma thought that they’d forgotten her then, that nobody in this family remembered her existence, and she was happy.

  She started playing truant, hanging around in the streets. She threw away her schoolbooks, she shortened her skirts, and—with the help of a Spanish friend—she plucked her eyebrows and had her hair cut in the latest fashion. From the drawers of her mother’s bedside table she stole enough money to buy cigarettes and bottles of Coca-Cola. And when Yasmine threatened to tell on her she took the old slave in her arms and said: “Oh no, Yasmine, you won’t do that.” Yasmine, who had lived her whole life in other people’s homes, under other people’s command, now took control of the household. Hanging from her belt was a heavy bunch of keys and the jangling it made could be heard in the corridor and out on the patio. She was in charge of the stores of flour and lentils that Mouilala, traumatized by years of war and scarcity, continued to build up. She alone could open the locks on all the doors, the cedar chests decorated with palmettes and the large cupboards where Mouilala’s trousseau had been left to gather mold. At night, when Selma disappeared while her mother slept, the old servant sat on the patio and waited for her. In the darkness all that could be seen of her was the incandescent end of the filterless cigarettes she smoked, dimly and flickeringly illuminating her black-skinned, battered old face. In a vague way she understood the young woman’s desire for freedom. Selma’s escapes awoke ancient, long-extinguished desires in the former slave’s heart.

  * * *

  In the cold months of early 1955, Selma spent her mornings at the movies and her afternoons at her friends’ houses or in the back of a café where the owner demanded that all drinks be paid for in advance. There the girls talked about love and travel, beautiful cars, and the best way to escape their parents’ prying eyes. Their parents were at the center of all their conversations. Those old people who understood nothing, who couldn’t see that the world had changed, who scolded the young for their obsession with dancing and sunbathing. As for the boys, they played table football and—intoxicated by their idle days—loudly proclaimed that they didn’t care what their parents said. They were sick of hearing about Verdun and Monte Cassino, about Senegalese Tirailleurs and Spanish soldiers. They were sick of their parents’ memories of famine, dead babies, land lost in battles. All these boys cared about was rock ’n’ roll, American films, beautiful cars, and dates with girls who weren’t afraid to sneak out at night. Selma was their favorite. Not because she was the most beautiful or the most brazen, but because she made them laugh and she had a lust for life so intense that it seemed nothing could hold her back. She was irresistible when she imitated Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, shaking her head and saying “Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war!” in a girly, high-pitched voice. Other times she would make fun of Amine, and all her friends would be doubled over with laughter as she stood there frowning and puffing out her chest like an old soldier proud of his medals. “Think yourself lucky that you’ve never gone hungry!” she said in a deep voice, pointing her finger accusingly. “You’re just a silly little girl who’s never been through a war.” Selma wasn’t afraid. It never crossed her mind that someone might recognize her, denounce her. Or even that she was doing anything wrong. She believed in her lucky star and she dreamed of finding love. Every day, to her fear and excitement, the world seemed a little vaster, the possibilities open to her ever more infinite. Meknes grew so small, like a dress she’d outworn, a dress so tight that she found it hard to breathe, a dress that might rip open at the slightest movement. Sometimes that smallness made her angry and she would run screaming from a friend’s room or smash glasses full of hot tea from a café tabletop. “You’re going round in circles, can’t you see?” she would yell at them. “Always the same conversations. Always!” Her friends seemed so ordinary then, and she guessed that, behind their rebellious adolescent poses, they were really just obedient conformists. Some of the girls started to avoid her company. They didn’t want to risk their reputations by being seen with her.

  In the afternoons Selma would sometimes take refuge with her neighbor, Mademoiselle Fabre. This Frenchwoman had lived in the medina since the late 1920s, in a dilapidated old riad. The place was a mess: the living room filled with dirty benches, open chests, books stained with tea or food. The hangings had been nibbled by mice and the air smelled of unwashed cunt and rotten eggs. All the medina’s undesirables gathered in Mademoiselle Fabre’s riad, and Selma would often see orphans and poor young widows sleeping there, on the ground or in a corner of the living room. In winter the roof leaked, and the sound of the raindrops crashing against iron cisterns was mingled with the cries of children, the creaking of cartwheels out in the street, the clatter of weaving machines upstairs. Mademoiselle Fabre was an ugly woman. Her nose, with its dilated pores, was large and misshapen, her eyebrows were gray and sparse, and in the past few years she’d developed a tremble in her jaw that made it difficult to understand what she was saying. Under the baggy gandouras that she wore, Selma could see her paunchy belly and her thick legs covered in varicose veins. Around her neck she wore an ivory cross that she would stroke constantly like a charm or an amulet. She’d brought it from Central Africa, where she’d grown up, although she didn’t like to talk about that. Nobody knew anything about her childhood or about the years that had preceded her arrival in Morocco. The people in the medina said that she used to be a nun, that she was the daughter of a rich industrialist, that she’d been dragged here by a man she was madly in love with and then abandoned.

  Mademoiselle Fabre had lived among the Moroccans for more than thirty years, speaking their language, learning their customs. She was invited to weddings and religious ceremonies and had gradually become indistinguishable from the native women, drinking her hot tea in silence, blessing children, and calling for God’s mercy on a house. When women gathered she was let in on their secrets. She gave advice, wrote letters for those who couldn’t read, worried about shameful diseases and the marks of beatings. One day a woman told her: “If the pigeon had kept silent, the wolf wouldn’t have eaten
it.” Mademoiselle was always extremely discreet. She refused to rock the foundations of this world where she was only a foreigner, but that didn’t stop her from raging at the poverty and injustice she found here. Once, and only once, she had dared knock at the door of a man whose daughter showed exceptional gifts. She’d begged the girl’s strict father to support his child in her studies and offered to send her to a university in France. The man had not gotten angry. He hadn’t thrown her out of the house or accused her of spreading debauchery and disorder. He had just laughed. The old man had roared with hilarity and raised his arms in the air. “University!” After wiping his eyes, he’d accompanied Mademoiselle Fabre to the door, almost tenderly, and thanked her.

  Everyone forgave Mademoiselle Fabre her eccentricity because she was old and unattractive. Because they knew her to be good-hearted and generous. During the war she’d fed poor families and given clothes to children in rags. She’d chosen her camp and never lost an opportunity to show it. In September 1954 a Parisian journalist had come to write a feature on Meknes. He’d been advised to meet this Frenchwoman who’d organized a weaving workshop in her house and who was so helpful toward the town’s poor. The young man went there one afternoon and almost fainted in that hot, airless house. On the floor children were sorting bits of wool into different colors and then putting them in straw baskets. Upstairs young women were sitting in front of large vertical looms, weaving and chatting. In the kitchen two old black women were dunking their bread in chestnut puree. The reporter asked for a glass of water and Mademoiselle Fabre tapped his forehead and said: “Poor boy. Don’t get worked up. Don’t try to fight it.” They spoke about her good works, about life in the medina, about the moral and hygienic conditions of the young women who worked there. Then the journalist asked her if she was afraid of terrorists, if—like the rest of the French community—she was nervous about her safety. Mademoiselle Fabre looked up at the white, late-summer sky above her and balled her fists, as if to compose herself. “It’s not so long ago that we called people terrorists in France when they were resisting the Germans. Then they became Resistance heroes. After more than forty years of the protectorate, how can anyone expect the Moroccans not to demand freedom? They helped us fight for it, and we gave them a taste for it and taught them the value of it. They deserve it.” The journalist, who was pouring with sweat, responded that independence would eventually be granted, but that it should be a gradual process, and that it was wrong to attack those French people who’d sacrificed their lives for this country. What would become of Morocco once the French had left? Who would run the country? Who would work the earth? Mademoiselle Fabre cut him short. “I don’t care what the French think, to be perfectly honest. They seem to think that they’re the ones who’ve been invaded by the Moroccans, who are growing and asserting themselves. The French need to understand the reality here: they’re the foreigners.” And she told the journalist to leave, without offering to accompany him to his hotel in the new town.