In the Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  Corinne put on a bathing suit and Mathilde followed her onto the beach. Farther off, some families had set up large tents on the sand. They would camp there for a whole month, cooking on little terra-cotta canouns and washing in the public showers. Mathilde kept moving forward and when the water reached her chest she felt such happiness that she almost rushed over to Corinne and hugged her. She swam, as far as she could, diving down as deep as her lungs would permit. Occasionally she would turn around and see the little cabin getting smaller and smaller, more and more indistinct in that row of identical beach houses. Without knowing why, she started waving her arms, perhaps just to greet her children, or to tell them: “Look how far I’ve come.”

  Selim, wearing a straw hat that was too big for his head, was digging a hole in the sand. Some other children saw this and came over to look. “We’re going to make a castle,” said one little girl. “Mustn’t forget the moat!” said a boy with three missing teeth who spoke with a lisp. Aïcha sat with them. It was funny how easy it felt to make friends when you were on the beach! Half naked, their skin browned by the sun, they had fun together and thought of nothing but making the hole as deep as possible, until they struck water and saw a little lake form below their castle. Aïcha’s hair had been uncrinkled by the sea air and she ran her hands through the pretty curls, thinking how she would have to ask Mathilde to pour salt into her bathwater when they got back to the farm.

  Late that afternoon Corinne helped Mathilde wash the children. Wearing pajamas, sweetly exhausted by hours of playing and swimming, they lay on the terrace. Aïcha felt her eyelids growing heavy, but the beauty of the view kept her awake. The sky turned red, then pink, and at last a ring of purple haloed the horizon while the sun, more incandescent than ever, was slowly swallowed up by the sea. A man came along the beach selling grilled corn, and Aïcha nibbled the cob that Dragan handed her. She wasn’t hungry but she didn’t feel like saying no to anything; she wanted to enjoy everything that this day had to offer. She bit into the corn and some grains got stuck between her teeth. This felt quite unpleasant and she started to cough. Before falling asleep she heard something she’d never heard before: her father’s laughter, open, spontaneous, and without a care in the world.

  * * *

  When Aïcha woke the next morning the grown-ups were still asleep. She walked on to the terrace alone. She’d had a dream as long as those apple peels that Mathilde would sometimes make, lips pursed in concentration, intent on turning the skin of the fruit into a garland. The Palosis ate breakfast in their bathing suits, which seemed to shock Amine. “We live like castaways when we’re here,” said Dragan, whose milky skin had turned cherry-red. “We wear as little as possible and eat whatever the sea gives us.”

  By noon it was so hot that a cloud of red, shiny dragonflies formed just above the water; the insects nosedived into the sea before gliding back up again. The sky was white, the light dazzling. Mathilde moved the parasol and the towels as close to the water as she dared, so they could enjoy the coolness of the breeze and keep an eye on the children, who never tired of splashing in the waves, digging their hands into the wet sand, watching tiny fish dart around their ankles. Amine sat down next to his wife. He took off his shirt and trousers; underneath he was wearing a pair of trunks that Dragan had lent him. The skin of his belly, back and calves was pale and there was a tan line on his bare arms. He didn’t think he’d ever offered his body to the caress of the sun like this before.

  Amine couldn’t swim. Mouilala had always been afraid of the water and she’d forbidden her children to go near the wadi or even the well. “The water could swallow you up,” she’d told them. But watching children plunge into the waves and small, thin, white women adjusting their swimming caps as they swam, necks straight and heads bobbing above the surface of the water, Amine thought it couldn’t be that complicated. Why shouldn’t he do the same thing? After all, he could run faster than most other men, ride bareback, and climb a tree using only his hands.

  He was about to join his children when he heard Mathilde yell. A big wave had swept away the towels and Amine’s trousers. With his feet in the water he watched his trousers move back and forth on the water. The sea, like a jealous mistress, was taunting him, mocking his nudity. The children, laughing, raced to Amine’s clothes and the reward that they imagined they would receive. In the end it was Mathilde who grabbed his trousers and wrung the water out. “Come on,” said Amine, “we should go home now.”

  When they called the children, Aïcha and Selim refused to follow them. “No!” they shouted. “We don’t want to go home.” Amine and Mathilde stood in front of them on the sand and grew angry. “That’s enough! Get out of there now. Do you want me to come in and get you?” But the children left them no choice. Mathilde dived gracefully into the waves while Amine walked in cautiously until the water came up to his armpits. Coldly furious, he reached out and grabbed his son by the hair. Selim cried out. “Never disobey your father again, you understand me?”

  On the drive home Aïcha couldn’t hold back her tears. She stared at the horizon and refused to speak as her mother tried vainly to console her. She saw men in rags walking by the side of the road, their hands tied and their hair covered with dust, and she thought that they must have been rescued from some cave or hole. “Don’t look at them,” Mathilde told her.

  * * *

  It was the middle of the night when they got back to the farm. Mathilde carried Selim and Amine carried Aïcha. He thought she was asleep when he left her in the bed, but as he was about to close their bedroom door she asked: “Papa, only the bad French people are being attacked, aren’t they? The workers will protect the good ones, don’t you think?”

  Surprised, Amine sat down on her bed. He thought about it for a few seconds, head lowered and hands pressed together in front of his mouth.

  “No,” he told her firmly. “It has nothing to do with being good or bad. It has nothing to do with justice. There are good men whose farms have been burned and there are bastards who’ve gotten away scot-free. In war, goodness and badness and justice all go out the window.”

  “So this is war?”

  “Not really,” said Amine. And as if talking to himself he added: “In reality, it’s worse than war. Because our enemies—or the ones who are supposed to be our enemies—have lived with us for a long time. Some of them are our friends, our neighbors, our relatives. They’ve grown up with us and when I look at them I don’t see an enemy, I see a child.”

  “But are we on the side of the goodies or the baddies?”

  Aïcha sat up and watched him anxiously. It struck him that he didn’t know how to speak to children, that she probably didn’t understand what he’d been trying to tell her.

  “We,” he said, “are like your tree: half lemon and half orange. We’re not on either side.”

  “And are they going to kill us too?”

  “No, nothing will happen to us. I promise.” And he kissed his daughter softly on her cheek.

  After quietly closing the door and walking into the hallway, Amine thought about how the fruit of the lemange tree was inedible. Its pulp was dry and its taste so bitter that it brought tears to his eyes. And the world of men is just like the world of botany, he thought. In the end one species dominates another. One day the orange will win out over the lemon, or vice versa, and the tree will once again produce fruit that people can eat.

  * * *

  Amine felt certain that nobody would come to the farm to kill them, but he decided to make sure of it. Throughout August he slept with his rifle under the bed and he asked Mourad to do the same. The foreman helped Amine build a false bottom in the cupboard of the conjugal bedroom. They emptied it, removed the shelves and made a trapdoor to get in and out of the hiding place. “Come here,” he told the children one day, and Selim and Aïcha obeyed.

  “Go inside there.”

  Selim, grinning, slid through the opening
, and his sister followed him. Then Amine lowered the trapdoor and the children found themselves in total darkness. From their hiding place they could hear their father’s voice, muffled, and the footsteps of the adults pacing around the room.

  “If anything happens, if we’re in danger, this is where you have to hide.”

  Amine taught Mathilde how to handle a grenade, in case the farm was attacked while he was away. She listened with the concentration of a soldier, ready to do anything to protect her territory. A few days before this a man had come to the clinic. He was an old laborer who’d worked on the property all his life and had even known old Kadour Belhaj. When he asked to speak with her outside, under the palm tree, she imagined he must have some embarrassing condition or that he was going to ask for an advance on his wages or for one of his distant cousins to be given a job. The laborer talked about the weather, about this oppressive heat and this dry wind, which were bad for the harvests. He asked about her children and showered them with blessings. When he ran out of small talk he put his hand on Mathilde’s arm and whispered: “If I ever knock at your door, especially at night, don’t open it. Even if I tell you it’s an emergency, that someone is sick or needs your help, you must keep your door closed. Warn your children, tell the maid. If I come, it will be to kill you. It will be because I’ve ended up believing the words of those who say that if you want to go to heaven you must kill French people.” That night Mathilde picked up the rifle hidden under the bed and she walked barefoot out to the giant palm tree. In the darkness she fired against the trunk until all the ammunition was used up. The next morning, when Amine woke, he found the corpses of rats trapped in the ivy around the tree’s trunk. He asked Mathilde what had happened and she shrugged. “I couldn’t stand that noise any longer. The sound of their feet as they climbed the tree was giving me nightmares.”

  At the end of the month it finally happened. It was an August night, cloudless and silent. A red moon glowed between the tops of the cypresses and the children lay on the grass to watch for shooting stars. Because of the chergui winds they’d started eating dinner in the garden after nightfall. Green iridescent flies sizzled and died, caught in the melted wax of the candles. Dozens of bats flew from tree to tree and Aïcha touched her hair, fearing that they might make a nest in her tight curls.

  The women were the first to hear the gunshots, later that night. Their ears were attuned to hearing their babies’ cries, the moans of sick people, and they sat up in their beds with an ominous feeling in their chests. Mathilde ran to her children’s bedroom. She carried the warm, sleep-softened bodies, whispering, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” She told Tamo to hide them in the cupboard and Aïcha, still half lost in a dream, realized that the trapdoor had been closed on them and that she had to calm down her little brother. This was no time for crying or disobedience, and the two of them kept quiet. Aïcha thought about the flashlight that she used to catch birds. If only her father had given it to her . . .

  From her hiding place she heard Tamo begging to be allowed to go to the douar to find out if her family was all right and Amine yelling: “Everybody stay here!”

  The maid went to sit in the kitchen, weeping into her elbow and startling at the slightest sound.

  First there was a vast brightness, a distant explosion of violet that made a sort of hole in the night. The fire created a new horizon and it looked as though the sun was about to rise long before dawn. The bluish dazzle was followed by the orange glow of flames. For the first time in their lives, the countryside was ablaze with light at night. Their world was now a gigantic inferno and the landscape, usually so silent, was loud with the sound of gunfire and shouting, mingled with the howling of jackals, the hooting of owls.

  A few miles away the first orchards were set on fire, almond trees and peach trees consumed by flames. The terrible wind brought with it the smell of woodsmoke and burned leaves, as if thousands of women had gathered to prepare a feast for demons. The yells of the laborers on the colonists’ farms merged with the crackling of fire as they ran from the well to the stables, from the well to the blazing haystacks. Ashes and embers flew into the peasants’ faces, burned their backs and hands, but they didn’t feel the pain and kept running, buckets of water in hand. In the stables the animals were burned alive. All the goodwill in the world can’t bring an end to this massacre, Amine thought. Nothing can stop them. We’re trapped in the middle of the blaze, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be.

  A French army tank moved through the night onto their property. Amine and Mourad, who’d been patrolling the farm since dusk, told the driver that they were ex-soldiers. The tank driver asked them if they needed help. Amine looked at the huge vehicle, the soldier’s uniform, and he felt uneasy about this military presence on his land. He didn’t want his laborers to see him negotiating with this man who—in their eyes—was an invader.

  “No, no, everything’s fine, Commander. We don’t need anything. You can go on your way.” The tank moved off and Mourad stood at ease.

  —

  Under the trapdoor Selim was crying. He clung to his sister, smearing her with snot and tears, and she hissed: “Shut up, you idiot! If the bad men hear you, they’ll find us and kill us.” She put her hands over his mouth, but he wouldn’t keep still. She was straining to hear the sounds in the house and especially her mother’s voice, since Mathilde was the one she was most worried about. What would they do to her mother if they found her? Selim calmed down. He put his face to his sister’s chest and was surprised by how slowly her heart was beating. Aïcha’s lack of fear reassured him. She recited a prayer, mouth close to her brother’s ear. “Heavenly angel, my loyal and charitable guide, let me be so obedient to your wishes that I do not stray from my Lord’s commandments. Holy Virgin, mother of God, my mother and patron saint, I put myself under your protection.” And the two of them sank into sleep, soothed by the image of the angel protecting them.

  Aïcha woke first. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. Outside, all was silent. The gunfire seemed to have stopped and she wondered why nobody had come to let them out. What if they’re all dead and we are the only ones left alive? she thought. With both hands she pushed against the plank above her head and climbed to her feet. Then she opened the cupboard door. Selim was lying down and when she stood up he gave a little moan. The bedroom was in darkness. Aïcha walked slowly into the hallway, feeling her way with her hands. She knew where every piece of furniture was and she was careful not to knock anything over, to make no sound. She came to the kitchen; that, too, was empty and her heart contracted. Flies buzzed over the remains of their dinner. They must have come, she thought, and taken Tamo and my parents, even Selma. In that instant the house seemed to her enormous and hostile. She imagined herself a mother to her little brother, a little girl abandoned to an extraordinary fate. Tears welled in her eyes as she told herself stories of orphans and suffering, tales that terrified her and at the same time gave her courage.

  And then she heard Selma’s voice, distant, quickly fading. At first Aïcha thought she must have dreamed her aunt’s voice, but then it reached her ears again. She walked over to the window and there she could hear more clearly the sound of conversation. They must be on the roof, she thought, and she opened the door, relieved that they were alive and furious that they’d forgotten her. In the darkness she climbed the ladder that led to the roof terrace, and the first things she saw were the incandescent ends of the cigarettes that Amine and Mourad were smoking. The two men were sitting side by side on crates of drying almonds while their wives stood with their backs turned. Mathilde was staring at the lights of the town, just visible from their hilltop. Selma was contemplating the fire. “It won’t reach here, thank God. The hill will be spared. The wind has dropped and there’ll be a storm soon.” Selma opened her arms wide, like Christ on the cross, and yelled, her voice a hoarse howl, like an echo of the jackals who’d been stirred up by the fire. Mourad threw his ciga
rette to the ground and roughly pulled his wife’s skirt to make her sit.

  Aïcha, standing on a rung of the ladder, her face just poking up over the edge of the roof, hesitated before showing herself. Maybe she would get in trouble? Her father would tell her off for following them up to the rooftop, sticking her nose in the grown-ups’ business, not knowing her place. In the distance she saw a cloud in the shape of a giant brain. It flickered and glowed, as if filled with electricity. Selma was right: it was going to rain, and the rain would save them. Her prayers had not been in vain. Aïcha’s angel had kept her promises. She cautiously stepped onto the roof and walked quietly toward Mathilde, who saw her and said nothing. She pressed her daughter’s head against her belly and turned her face to the dying flames.

  A world was vanishing before their eyes. The colonists’ houses were burning. The fire devoured the dresses of nice little girls, the chic coats of mothers. Books were reduced to ashes, as were family heirlooms brought from France and proudly exhibited to the natives. Aïcha couldn’t take her eyes off this spectacle. Never had the hill seemed so beautiful to her. She could have shouted with happiness. She wanted to say something, to start laughing or dancing like those chouafas that her grandmother had told her about, who spun around until they fainted. But Aïcha didn’t move. She sat next to her father and pressed her legs to her chest. Let them burn, she thought. Let them go away. Let them die.