In the Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  Early in the morning Omar called out to the caretaker: “Find a doctor. If the police ask you where you’re going, tell them a woman is giving birth and it’s urgent. Hurry up! You find a doctor and then you come back here, understood?”

  He handed him some money and the old man, relieved to be free of that cursed house, quickly left.

  Two hours later Dragan arrived. He hadn’t asked the old man any questions, he’d just picked up his old leather bag and followed him. He wasn’t expecting to see Omar and he took a step back when the young man’s tall body appeared in front of him.

  “This guy’s wounded.”

  Dragan followed him and leaned over the boy, who was breathing weakly. Behind him Amine’s brother fidgeted. Without his glasses he looked more childlike, his fine features drawn with tiredness. His hair was sticky with sweat and his neck was covered with dried blood. He stank.

  Dragan rummaged around in his bag. He asked the old man to boil some water so he could clean his instruments. The doctor disinfected the wound and made a sort of bandage around the injured arm, then gave the boy a tranquilizer. While he was treating him Dragan spoke softly, stroked the boy’s forehead, and reassured him.

  While Dragan was busy sewing up the wound, Omar’s comrades had come into the house. Observing the deference with which they treated their leader the caretaker became suddenly obsequious. He ran to the kitchen and began making tea for the resistance fighters. He cursed the French, calling them infidels, and when his eyes met Dragan’s the doctor just shrugged to show that he didn’t care.

  The doctor went over to Omar before leaving.

  “You’ll have to check the wound and keep it clean. I can drop by again tonight if you want. I’ll bring a clean bandage and some medicine for the fever.”

  “That’s very kind of you, but we’ll be gone by tonight,” Omar replied.

  “Your brother’s worried about you. He’s been searching for you. The rumor was that you were in prison.”

  “We’re all in prison. As long as we live in a colonized country we can’t call ourselves free.”

  Dragan didn’t know what to say to this. He shook Omar’s hand and left. He walked through the deserted streets of the medina and the few faces he saw were marked with grief and sorrow. The voice of a muezzin rose into the sky. That morning four boys had been buried. The French police had set up a security cordon at dawn, and they had protected the funeral procession as it peacefully entered the mosque. When Omar had seen Dragan to the door he’d offered him money but the doctor had coldly refused. He’s a cruel man, Dragan thought on his way home. Amine’s brother reminded him of other men he’d met during his travels. Men full of fine words and grandiose ideals who had used up all their humanity in the speeches they gave.

  Dragan let his chauffeur go for the day. He sat at the wheel of his car and drove, windows open, to the Belhaj farm. Outside, the sky was a tender blue and the heat so oppressive that he half expected the fields to burst into flame at any moment. He opened his mouth and breathed in the hot wind, the ill wind that warmed his lungs and made him cough. The air smelled of bay leaves and crushed stink bugs. As always in such moments of melancholy he thought about his trees, about the ripe, juicy oranges that would one day roll on Czech and Hungarian tables, as if he’d sent a parcel of sunlight to those nightlands.

  When he reached the hill he felt almost guilty at being the bearer of sad news. He wasn’t one of those people who believed in the myth of villages filled with easygoing, happy Berber peasants. All the same, he knew that there was a sort of peace and harmony in this place, which Amine and Mathilde felt responsible for maintaining. He didn’t realize that they kept themselves deliberately apart from the fury of the town, that they kept the radio silent, and that newspapers were used here only for packing up fresh eggs or making little hats and airplanes for Selim. He parked his car. In the distance he could see Amine hurrying home. In the garden Aïcha had climbed a tree and Selma was sitting on the swing that Amine had hung from the branches of the “lemange” tree. The hot concrete tiles had been watered and a cloud of steam was rising from the ground. Inside the foliage, birds flew and sang, and tears welled in Dragan’s eyes as he contemplated the indifference of nature and the stupidity of men. We will all kill one another, he thought, and butterflies will continue to fly.

  Mathilde looked so happy to see Dragan that he felt his heart contract even more. She wanted to lead him into the clinic, show him the progress she’d made in arranging her instruments and medicines. She asked about Corinne, who was staying in their cabin by the sea, and whom he missed. She said he should eat lunch with them and, as he noticed that her neck and cheeks were covered with red blotches, she apologized that all they were going to eat was coffee and toast. “It’s silly, but the children like it.” Dragan, afraid of being overheard, whispered that he’d come about something serious and that perhaps they should talk about it in the office.

  He sat facing Amine and Mathilde and, in a neutral voice, told them about last night’s events. Amine shifted in his chair and stared through the window, as if he had more urgent business elsewhere. His expression seemed to say: “What does this have to do with me?” When Dragan spoke Omar’s name the couple froze, suddenly attentive and united. Not once did they look at each other, but Dragan could see that they were holding hands. At that moment they were not in opposing camps. They weren’t rejoicing in the other’s misfortune. They weren’t waiting for the other to cry or punch the air so that they could angrily insult them. No, at that moment they both belonged to a camp that didn’t exist, a strange camp where forgiveness for violence and compassion for both the killers and the killed was mixed in equal measure. All the feelings that rose inside them seemed like a form of treachery, and so they preferred to stay silent. They were at once victims and murderers, companions and enemies, two hybrid beings incapable of giving a name to their loyalties. They were excommunicated; two worshippers who could no longer pray in any church and whose god was a secret god, a private god whose name they didn’t even know.

  IX

  Eid al-Adha fell on July 30 that year. In the town, as in the village, people feared that the festival celebrating Abraham’s sacrifice would turn into a massacre. The resident-general gave very strict instructions to the soldiers stationed in Meknes and to the bureaucrats, who were angry that they wouldn’t be able to return to France for the summer. Many of the colonists near the Belhaj farm were leaving their properties. Roger Mariani was going to Cabo Negro, where he owned a house.

  One week before the festival Amine bought a ram. He tied the animal to the weeping willow and Mourad fed it straw. From the tall window in the living room Aïcha and her brother watched the ram, with its yellowish hair, its sad eyes, its menacing horns. Selim wanted to go outside and stroke the animal, but his sister wouldn’t let him. “Papa bought it for us,” he kept repeating, and Aïcha felt a sudden urge to be cruel. In gory detail she described exactly what would happen to the ram. The children weren’t allowed to watch when the butcher came to slit the animal’s throat and the blood gushed out then spread through the grass of the garden. Tamo fetched a bowl and cleaned the red grass while thanking God for His generosity.

  As the women ululated, one of the laborers butchered the animal on the ground. Its skin was hung on the front gate. Tamo and her sisters made large fires in the backyard where the meat would be grilled. Through the kitchen window the children watched as embers flew, and listened as hands were plunged into the animal’s entrails, making a sound like sponges soaked with mucus, a slimy, sucking sound.

  Mathilde put the heart, lungs, and liver into a large iron vat. She summoned Aïcha and pushed the child’s face toward the purplish heart. “Look, it’s exactly like it is in the book. The blood goes through there.” She stuck her finger in the aorta then pointed out the two ventricles and the atrium, concluding with the words: “And I’ve forgotten what that one’s called.” Next sh
e picked up the lungs as the maids stared in horror at this sacrilegious behavior. Mathilde placed the two gray, viscous bags under the tap and watched them fill with water. Selim clapped his hands and she kissed him on the forehead. “Imagine it’s air instead of water. You see, my love, that’s how we breathe.”

  Three days after the festival, men from the liberation army turned up in the douar in the middle of the night, faces hidden under black balaclavas. They ordered Ito and Ba Miloud to feed them and find them some gasoline. And they left the next morning, promising that victory was close and that the years of depredation were behind them.

  * * *

  At the time, Mathilde thought her children were too young to understand what was happening. She didn’t explain the situation to them, but that was not out of indifference or a determination to keep them in the dark. She believed that children lived in a bubble of innocence that no adult could pierce, no matter what was going on. Mathilde thought she understood her daughter better than anyone; she believed she could read her soul as easily as she could look at a beautiful landscape through a window. She treated Aïcha like a friend, an accomplice, telling her secrets that she was too young to know, then reassuring herself with the thought: What she doesn’t understand can’t hurt her.

  And she was right: Aïcha didn’t understand. To her the adult world appeared hazy, indistinct, like the countryside at dawn or in the evening twilight, those hours when the shapes of things faded and blurred. Her parents talked in front of her and she caught snatches of those conversations when they lowered their voices and used words like murder and disappearance. Aïcha would sometimes ask herself silent questions. She wondered why Selma didn’t sleep with her anymore. Why the female workers let themselves be dragged into the tall grass by the men, with their cracked hands and sun-reddened necks. She suspected that there was something called misfortune and that men were capable of cruelty. And she sought explanations in the nature that surrounded her.

  That summer she returned to her life as a little savage, a life with no timetable or constraints. She explored the world of the hill, which was, for her, like an island in the middle of the plain. Sometimes there were other children, boys of her age carrying dirty, frightened lambs. They walked through the fields bare-chested, and their skin was browned by the sun, the hair on their forearms and the backs of their necks turned blond. Trickles of sweat ran down their dusty chests. Aïcha felt something stir inside her when these young shepherds came toward her and offered to let her stroke the animals. She couldn’t stop staring at their muscular shoulders, their thick ankles, and she saw in each of them the man he would become. For now, they were children like her, and they floated in a state of grace, but Aïcha understood—without being entirely aware of it—that adult life was already changing them. That work and poverty made their bodies age more quickly than hers.

  Every day she followed the procession of laborers as they walked under the trees, imitating their movements while trying hard not to disturb their work. She helped them build a scarecrow with some of Amine’s old clothes and fresh straw. She hung shards of broken mirrors in the branches of trees to scare away birds. For hours she would watch the owl’s nest in the avocado tree or a molehill at the bottom of the garden. She was patient and silent and she learned to catch chameleons and lizards, which she hid in a box, occasionally lifting the lid for a moment to observe her prey. On a path one morning she found a tiny bird embryo, no bigger than her little finger. The creature, which wasn’t even quite a creature, had a beak and claws, a skeleton so small that it was almost unreal. Aïcha lay with her cheek against the earth and watched ants running over the corpse. Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they’re not cruel, she thought. She wished she could question the earth, ask it about all the things it had seen, the other people who’d lived here before her, those who were dead and whom she’d never known.

  Precisely because she felt free, Aïcha wanted to find the limits of the domain. She’d never really known where she was allowed to go, where her family’s property ended and the others’ land began. Each day her energy took her a little farther and she kept expecting to find a wall, a fence, a cliff, something that would tell her: “This is where you must stop. You cannot go any farther.” One afternoon she walked past the hangar where the tractor was parked. She crossed through fields of quince and olive trees, she beat a way through the tall stems of the sunflowers burned by the summer heat. She found herself in a small enclosure where nettles and other weeds grew waist-high and here, at last, she saw a whitewashed wall, about three feet high. She had been here before, a long time ago: as a little girl she’d held Mathilde’s hand as her mother picked flowers and waved away gnats. Then her mother had shown her the wall and said: “That’s where your father and I will be buried.” Aïcha walked through the enclosure. The scent of honey seeped from cactuses covered in prickly pears and she lay on the ground in the place where she imagined her mother’s body would be buried. Was it possible that one day Mathilde would be very old, as old and wrinkled as Mouilala? Aïcha put her elbow over her eyes to shield her face from the sun and dreamed of the anatomical plates that Dragan had given them. She knew by heart the names of certain bones in Hungarian: combcsont for the femur, gerinc for the spine, kulcscsont for the clavicle.

  * * *

  During dinner one evening Amine announced that they were going to spend two days by the sea, on the beach at Mehdia. There was nothing surprising about that particular destination; it was the closest beach to Meknes, only a three-hour drive away. But Amine had always mocked Mathilde for the leisure activities she craved: picnics, forest walks, mountain hikes. People who liked having fun, he said, were lazy, good-for-nothing shirkers. That he’d organized this outing was perhaps due to Dragan, who kept urging him to stay at their cabin, and who—always close to Mathilde—saw flashes of envy in the young woman’s eyes whenever he mentioned his holidays. There was no malice in that envy, only sadness; it was more like the envy of a child who sees another child cuddling a toy that she knows, with simple resignation, she will never possess. Or perhaps Amine had been driven to it by deeper feelings, a desire to be forgiven by his wife—whom he could see slowly fading here on this hill, in this world of endless work—and to bring some happiness into her life.

  They left in the car at dawn. The sky was pink, and at that hour the flowers that Mathilde had planted near the entrance of the property were especially fragrant. Amine had been in a hurry to leave: he wanted to make the drive while it was still cool outside. Selma was staying at the farm. She didn’t get up to wish them good-bye and Mathilde thought it was better that way. She wouldn’t have been able to meet the girl’s eye. Selim and Aïcha sat in the backseat. Mathilde wore her raffia hat. In a large basket she’d packed two small spades and an old bucket.

  A few miles from the sea, they encountered traffic jams. Selim had thrown up, and the car smelled of his vomit: sour milk and Coca-Cola. They got lost in streets filled with vacationing families and it took them a long time to find the Palosis’ cabin. On the terrace Corinne was sunbathing while Dragan, his face red and bathed in sweat, had drunk a bit too much beer. He was happy to see them and he carried Aïcha in his arms. He made her fly, and that memory—the memory of her lightness in those huge, hairy hands—would be almost as strong, almost as unbearable, as her memory of the sea. “What?” said the doctor. “You’ve never seen the sea before? Well, we have to do something about that!” He carried the little girl across the sand, but she wanted him to go more slowly. She wanted to stay on that sun-soaked terrace a little longer, eyes closed, listening to the strange, deafening sound of the sea. That was what she liked most to start with. That was what she found beautiful. That sound, like when someone rolls up a newspaper into the shape of a telescope and puts it to your ear and blows. That sound, like the breathing of someone who’s deeply asleep, enjoying sweet dreams. That backwash, that tender fury, distorted and amplified by the muffled laughter of playin
g children, the warnings of mothers—“Don’t get too close, you might drown!”—the laments of beignet vendors as their feet burned on the hot sand. Dragan, still holding her in his arms, advanced toward the water. He put her down and Aïcha sat on the beach to take off her beige leather sandals. The sea touched her and not for an instant was she frightened. With her fingertips she tried to catch the foam that bubbled at the waves’ edges. “L’écume,” said Dragan in his strong accent, pointing at the white froth. He seemed proud that he knew the word.

  The grown-ups ate lunch on the terrace. “A fisherman came this morning to show us what he’d caught. You’ll never eat anything fresher than this in your life.” The maid, who had come with them from Meknes, had prepared a salad of tomatoes and pickled carrots, and using their fingers they ate grilled sardines and a sort of white fish, long like an eel, with a firm, bland flesh. Mathilde kept fiddling with the children’s plates, reducing the fish to shreds. “Well, we don’t want them to choke on a bone, do we?” she said. “It would ruin everything.”

  As a child Mathilde had been a brilliant swimmer. Her classmates said she had the body for it. Broad shoulders, strong thighs, thick skin. She would go swimming in the Rhine even in autumn, even before the arrival of spring, and come out with violet lips and wrinkled fingers. She could hold her breath for a very long time and she liked nothing better than having her head underwater, being submerged in what was not a silence but a whistling of the depths, an absence of human agitation. Once, when she was fourteen or fifteen, she’d floated, her face half underwater like an old branch, for so long that one of her friends had dived in to rescue her. He’d thought she was dead, like those girls in romance stories who drown themselves in a river over a lost love. But Mathilde had raised her head and laughed: “Fooled you!” The boy had gotten angry then. “Now my new pants are wet! My mother’s going to kill me . . .”