So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  Outside, however, I was not at all in turmoil. Only the present moment existed, hard in its innocence. What was it that was growing imperceptibly inside me and yet apart from me?

  In the yard, lit aslant by the pale sun, in the midst of these villas almost all deserted because their occupants had gone back to their offices, their social life, their protocol there in the capital, we two were survivors of summer … My laughter grows louder, my partner lets out a disappointed curse, because I’m winning, I’m triumphant. He goes after the ball; I sing to myself; we start our game again. We are almost equals. I save a shot, I keep up my defense, then I lose ground, I burst out laughing, I’m out of breath, I’m nearly beaten, I don’t want that! … He pokes fun, takes the lead, his game turns out to be the steadier, the game seems too long for me, I’m impatient, I …

  “How much fun it is, being children together!” I suddenly confess, taken aback by my discovery (with the result that I forget to parry, I lose, pretend to be sorry, I’m so far behind!) My surprise increases: Am I going to relive a past I never knew? Find myself in childhood with you? Is that the whole mystery?

  I am making this truth glow in the hollows of my body, creeping all up and down my limbs (I run, I prance, my arm stretches high). Casual and carefree and absolutely, perfectly, tranquil watching you be my partner in this lightheartedness—a docile partner, one who is also leaping—I think I am six or ten years old, you are my playmate, this yard becomes the one in the village where I lived as a little girl … Where I might have met you before. No one around us would have found fault. Would you have been a cousin, or better, a paternal first cousin? You would have …

  At first I didn’t even notice that the age difference (nearly ten years) should have prevented my keeping this fantasy alive: This man could not have been a child when I was! It is only just now that we are meeting! It does not matter: Is every love not a return to the first realm, that Eden? Since I could not have known him before (the prohibitions of my Muslim education having operated in two ways), I savor him as we play these games, in these first days of winter.

  What time was it when we went back into the living room? I remember that we spent an hour or two in combined inertia, listening together to several records that I chose, but I refused to get involved in commentary or after-the-fact explanations of my choice. Music—to keep any dreadfully banal strategy from coming into play, we would listen to music, the prelude to our abandon!

  I listened. Seated at the other end of the room with my head turned toward the French doors opening onto the vast beach. After quite a while I just stood up all of a sudden; I announced I wanted to leave. Outside, the evening was growing dark, gray and rose.

  My Beloved got his car out to take me back. Driving back; night beginning. I was silent for the entire length of the trip; it seemed to me that we were going to drive all night long, to faraway lands.

  When we got there, he stopped the engine and turned toward me: Did he have any idea how good I felt? Or share the feeling? His face, his eyes were so close in the intimacy of the car. His eyes shone and he said softly, “Did I disappoint you?” … barely uttering my first name.

  “Disappoint me? How?” I replied, uncomprehending, then suddenly I embraced him: “I’ll give you a kiss,” I said, and I kissed him on his forehead, on his eyes, I stopped, I pulled away, I opened the car door.

  He said my name again; I was halfway out and I added, almost cool, “I kissed you because tomorrow I’m taking a plane. I’ll be gone ten days or maybe twenty. I’m going to miss you!”

  “You’re leaving! Where are you going?”

  “Canada. Goodbye!”

  I fled. Only then did my heart begin to beat uncontrollably. I stood there transfixed after the car left, swallowed up in the garden’s shadows; I waited for my breathing to return to its normal rhythm.

  In the elevator I shook for the entire ten floors.

  It all comes back to me; nothing is forgotten; but the acid of obliteration inexorably does its work anyway. I was thirty-seven at the time; ever since the age of twenty I had experienced a calm, enriching love, full of ambiguities I did not understand; the story, in its own way, could go on. What was the meaning of this great wave, this swell inside me? Why, I wondered, did I have this mad desire to relive childhood, or rather to be finally fully alive?

  I thought, in the elevator, that I was shivering with cold, and I said to myself tearfully, Don’t come back from Canada. Go somewhere even farther, flee, get lost, never come back! I don’t want to slide into a wretched novel when I return!

  I never pronounced the word passion. I didn’t dwell on either the word or the idea. I did not even guess that I was in the first stages of this strange illness that, for better or worse, would follow its own course.

  3

  SPACE, DARKNESS

  WHEN I RETURNED, my confusion was gone and I considered the episode laughable, a passing weakness. It turned out I had to work in the same place as the Beloved.

  Usually by chance, sometimes out of professional necessity, surrounded by other people, at least once a day we would meet for five minutes or an hour. I could have prolonged our meetings under some pretext but didn’t think of it. Working under the same roof together! He was on the sixth floor and I was on the ninth, occupying offices almost identically arranged. I was struck by this, as if our parallel work spaces maintained some complicity between us (and so, in the snares of mutual attraction, the least details swell with exaggerated importance).

  I remember how using the office phones made me want to talk to him, my voice low as if he were close by, because he was close by:

  “Are you alone?” I would have asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Let’s talk!”

  At least once a day, whenever work let up, I had this temptation to speak to him; an urge drilling into my heart. I usually brushed aside this desire. The sun-dazzled love affair that was all in my mind lay in wait deep within, but an inexplicable seriousness was taking shape inside me and gaining the upper hand.

  At other times the danger, even though I knew I would not give in to it, was harrowing and persistent; there would be long moments of suffering. I would finally get up and cross my office to open the window, imagining that I could turn into a mermaid swimming in the blue. In just a few strokes I’d be there outside his window, invisible, to spy on him or rather fill my eyes with the image of him … I would return to my chair, and to my work, without enthusiasm.

  Sometimes, uncontrollably distracted, I would abruptly stop everything, go out, take the elevator, and leave the building. Flee! Walk fast as far as possible, keep going on and on to lose myself forever, because back there at work, in my thoughts, I had found myself lost.

  This upsurge turned into anger at myself, against what, as I rushed down a noisy boulevard, I took to be unacceptable weakness. And my mind, falling into the rhythm of my energetic walk, would be set in motion. What justified my being so stirred up? What was feeding my attraction? What was it about him? What was so extraordinary about this young man who was, after all, ordinary? This world, and this country in particular, were full of driven and inspired adventurers, unknown heroes wrapped in rare humility, this city itself—fifteen years earlier oozing bloodshed and lyricism—still contained at least ten or maybe twenty men, now living anonymous lives, who had shown how exceptional they were in their courage, their altruism, their Roman virtue, their …

  Gradually I would grow calmer and get back to work. I did not forget that on the sixth floor an ordinary young man was working—a man whose voice never left me, whose gaze had come from childhood to pursue me. This man had power over me even if I was determined not to give in to it. That same day, a couple of hours later, meeting up with my Beloved in the elevator, I would smile innocently at him, happy to see him without having sought him out, reassured by my earlier victory over myself—something he was never to know about.

  Nonetheless, two or three times in the course of these five or
six months (I was starting research in musicology in this building whose musical archive was great treasure), I could not resist dialing his office number, feigning casualness in my gay tone of voice. I said, “Let’s talk! Let’s have recess, like at school!”

  “Well, then, come down!”

  “I can’t. Let’s talk on the phone. Whoever gets interrupted will instantly hang up, without saying goodbye. The other will understand.”

  He agreed. We exchanged small talk, things we had read, bits of the past that came up willy-nilly. He was usually the one to remember: a fragment of adolescence, a walk, a trip. I listened and kept quiet. I felt that the way I listened encouraged him. One evening it seemed to me that his reminiscence was becoming so personal that I began to fear for him; I interrupted, calling him by his first name: “Listen, what if someone is listening on the line?” I ventured.

  “You’re right!” he admitted; the conversation took off in another direction.

  Once we must have talked for more than two hours straight. Finally I had the illusion that we were in the same room, each at a different end of it, settled into the darkness, and in fact we were so oblivious that I hadn’t turned on the office lights and night had crept in and swallowed me up. He confessed to the same thing.

  I remarked that if one of our colleagues were to come, and hear us speaking softly on the telephone in the dark, what plotting he would suspect! We laughed like two kids on vacation …

  “Did you ever know anyone like me? In a village? The sirocco would be blowing outside and all the children had been sent to take a nap and stay there … It seemed to me just now that I was whispering from my corner of the darkened room to my first cousin at the other end!”

  He murmured, amused: “So, I’m your first cousin! Pleased to discover the bond!”

  I went on, now speaking in Arabic; at the other end of the line I felt a pause or hesitation, so I went back to French: “Could you be my paternal uncle’s son? (that is what I had just said in Arabic). No, it’s not possible. I’ve just remembered that my father is the only son, because he lost his adolescent brother in a bus accident a long time ago. You might be the son of my maternal uncle, though! You know that the paternal branch is what counts for inheritance, and consequently, in a marriage for money, whereas the maternal line is, on the other hand, the line of tender emotions, affection, and …”

  I was going to add “love,” but in this conversation about this and that, the French word would have seemed obscene to me.

  “You’re teaching me all sorts of things, professor!” he joked.

  Taken aback by his ignorance, I dared my first personal question: “Really? Didn’t you have an Arab childhood?” Then I added, without thinking, “Maybe your mother is French, or …”

  I was ashamed at being so indiscreet.

  “No, not French,” he replied. “She was Berber, or in any case a speaker of Berber. But she always spoke to me in French, nothing but French!” He laughed and added somewhat roughly, “Didn’t you notice that I only speak French? Not a single Arabic or Berber word comes into my sentences. Nothing, no exception, no asides!” He laughed nervously. “Let’s say I talk like a pied-noir. I speak English very well if you want variety.” Silence; he mused. “I was twelve at Independence … I shut myself off completely from Arabic—’dhe national language,’ as they call it here. And I don’t think that I’ll develop a taste for the official language. I’m not planning a career!”

  I listened to him but I did not retort as I should have: Those eight or nine years by which I am older than you mark a changing era. When I was fifteen I lived in a country at war! Arabic was the language of flames—not of governmental power, as it is now. When one learned Arabic, outside of school, it was not to have a career but to be willing to die! Oh, how I wanted to go off into the mountains then!

  Instead, after a silence I added in a sad voice, “I’m hanging up! Turning on the lights. Goodbye!”

  The lights went on in our two offices simultaneously. An hour later we said goodbye among other colleagues, on the square at the main entrance.

  I went home in a whirl, my soul overwhelmed. What is time? I thought. Have I not returned if not to the time of my childhood, at least to my preadolescence? Have I not found my first cousin, the real one, the one I truly love—the other one was brash and insolent; this one would have been affectionate and conspiratorial. We would have shared all the fun and joy of that time with a twinkle in our eyes.

  I went home enriched, magnified. Full of infinite patience for the other life, the life of family awaiting me there. The children’s school assignments had to be checked, dinner had to be served. Their father was absorbed in his reading and I ended up in front of the television screen, staring but not seeing or hearing. I stayed up to tuck in my little daughter and kiss my son, but then I was the first to bed, happy to curl up alone at first. A book fell from my hand: books, mere books, so different from my secret life. An invisible stork seemed to step softly toward me, brushing against my eyelids as I sank into a pool of oblivion.

  Other times my work would keep me late. I had told them at home not to wait for me. Happy to be working so well at the top of this building at a time when almost all the employees had left, I hardly even wondered if he, on the sixth floor, was as lost in his work as I was. I was deeply absorbed. The temptation to pick up the phone never occurred to me; precisely because of my solitude, I would have felt it was improper.

  There was a driver with a company car waiting for me. I could, of course, have figured out some way to let him go (even though it was his regular night schedule). I could have checked with the Beloved—who was, after all, my colleague, whose habit of working late I knew—to see if he could take me home. But the memory of that December evening in his car when I had kissed his forehead, his eyes … Am I crazy? I thought, remembering this. Is there a madwoman inside me who any minute now can surge into my life of flat calm, possessing me and sweeping everything away? Yes, am I a woman possessed?

  Three times I said the name of Allah. That very evening, taking the staircase down, when I got to the sixth floor, I noticed, almost in spite of myself, that the lights were still on in my Beloved’s office in the empty corridor. The timed switch suddenly plunged the hall into darkness. I stood rigidly facing the wall, leaning my forehead against the cold wall, and this time I recited the fatiha from beginning to end, arming myself against any rash impulse. I groped for the switch and found it, turning the lights back on, and sighed, thinking, Finally, the danger is gone! My heart drained. Slowly walking the rest of the way downstairs, leaving a heavy weight up there in the shadows.

  The driver was waiting for me. “Lalla, Madame, I need some advice.”

  He went on in Arabic recounting his family troubles to me. His ten-year-old daughter was in school and apparently very intelligent—or in any case that’s what the teacher said. But her mother, his wife, kept insisting that this beloved daughter had to stop her schooling: “ ‘She has to help me with the little ones!’ is what she says.”

  He thought for a moment, then added, “Her mother can’t take it anymore!” He hesitated, unable to decide in favor of the wife or, as his heart was inclined, protecting his little girl for just a year or two longer.

  “Let her have a chance!” I said.

  One other evening we returned to this conversation. I lived not far away, but still he had to drive me home because, fifteen years after the war—“after the events,” in the amazingly terse expression that people still used—the black night threw a de facto curfew onto the streets of the capital. Fear ripples remained without there really being any fear, maybe just a whiff of insecurity in which the inhabitants seemed to take pleasure. Consequently, being a woman and unable to drive a car, after seven P.M. I could not walk even a hundred meters alone outdoors.

  Shortly afterward, standing on my kitchen balcony, I guessed which window was still lit up over there on the sixth story of the tall building. The one to whom I could have gone
ten minutes earlier, he to whom, this time, showing up so late, I would let myself go.

  I would have said to him, Let’s spend the night together! And the veiled passivity that I sometimes read in his eyes when he looked at me in my confusion, his hesitation would, I imagine, have triggered my joyful enthusiasm:

  Let’s go into the city, it doesn’t matter where, to a bar, to a dance hall, to a bad place or to your place, there on the beach, open the house up again for me if you have closed it. It doesn’t matter where we go, but let’s stay together all night long!

  Of course I would have phoned home and told the husband, Don’t wait up for me tonight. Tomorrow, at dawn, I’ll explain. The next day I would have revealed everything about the state of my heart. What love does not need an arbiter, and that night, that long night, having finally decided on my judge, I would no longer have been right to keep silent about my inner struggles. Yes, that night I would have surrendered to the violent, patient attraction that I had made myself control up to this point, but then, in a single night, had let carry me away!

  I fantasized this sequence of events, like water rushing through an open dam. I experienced it while standing in the darkness, on the balcony.

  A while ago I had said the fatiha, probably for the first time in my life (I disregard occasions in my childhood or even the time that I was twenty, shaken by a passing mysticism), as if Allah alone, in the darkness of that corridor on the sixth floor, had protected me—or imprisoned me, I didn’t know which—I acted as a woman in love who finally has only the magic of religiosity to cure her. The fatiha said from beginning to end, forehead against the wall, my hand groping in search of the light switch. I turned on the lights; I went down the stairs.