So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  Silence. The servant had just had a kanoun full of burning coals brought in without the mother noticing, and then slipped away. The silence stretched on but seemed translucent. In the shadows of the small, cool room, the mother saw the mask of Lla Rkia, her tawny scarf with black fringes. Beneath her half-lowered eyes, beneath her long, thin, arrogant nose, her thin, almost completely erased lips were murmuring in this no longer total silence: The old woman was uttering scattered, disconnected scraps of sura. Finally, they could hear the language of the Koran as if it were pouring from the mouth of a woman half dead: this time the mother waited without emotion. The sorceress swiftly threw a powder, or some herbs or a little sac of medicine, into the kanoun without having it brought closer to her. All at once whitish, then almost green smoke rose up, and for a moment the acrid smell made the two visitors cough. Inscrutable, the old woman waited, then when the smoke had dissipated and the women were calm, she asked in a haughty voice, “What month was he born, your prince?”

  The mother hesitated and then said, “In the month of Rdjeb. The twenty-seventh, I believe.”

  Once again, the fear in her causing panic (her wind a storm inside her). She hunched over, bent her head over her breast, tried to find the breath left hanging; finally she thought that she herself might say the beginning of a sura, the one everyone said, the fatiha. She repeated the first lines two or three times and regained her calm. She watched the lips of the soothsayer, whose eyelids were lowered in concentration.

  The silence settled in the room. The sister-in-law seemed invisible, or dead. You could not even hear her breath, thought the mother, who was patient now and confident. If Salim knew, she said to herself, he would surely make fun of her! But if he saw her now, full of confidence, he would smile at her indulgently. Imagining this, this sort of tacit affection for her that he had expressed ever since puberty, was a comfort to her.

  The old woman coughed. Then she began:

  “Do not worry about the youth! The protection of Sid el-Berkani,”—the mother was grateful that she had not forgotten the hallowed ancestor up in the nearby mountains—“is upon him.”

  She went on, speaking more softly, as if the vision were written down already and she only said what was there: “Do not worry about him. He will have a destiny … one greater than his father’s!” she finished off pompously.

  The sister-in-law gently put her hand on the arm of her companion, who had started unknowingly.

  After a sigh, almost a death rattle, the voice of Lla Rkia said loudly in triumphant tones, “I see him … I see him …” She hesitated then: “I see him walking on the road to Verdun!”

  This last French word, which she pronounced rolling the r, surprised them. The two visitors looked at each other despite the half-light. They both knew old pensioners, veterans of the other war, who were called, even in Arabic, “the men of Verdun”—always with a rolled r. So what did the other war, the one from which only old men remained, have to do with this one, “our war”? the women wondered. Could it be that old Rkia in turn, despite her magic potions and her recent pilgrimage, was slipping into some disturbing senility?

  “I will admit,” said the sister-in-law from under her veil on their return trip, “I thought, ‘She is rambling; she no longer can see the way she could before!’ But you see, she was firm when she said ‘Selim is in good health.’ Where he is does not matter!”

  “She did relieve my anxiety a little,” the mother acknowledged.

  They went home, where they found the others; of course it was only with the women, young and old, that they talked about Lla Rkia’s verdict. Some of them embraced our mother warmly and she thought to herself that this was one of the reasons she had come on this second day of Aïd—to share in the almost childish buzz of excitement and spontaneity.

  That same night she went back to their apartment in the capital with her daughter, who was her youngest child, and her husband.

  The following nights she slept peacefully.

  Ten days later a letter from the court in Metz, in Lorraine, arrived. The prison administration informed the father that his son, aged less than twenty-one, had been arrested, that he was being indicted for “criminal association” and other equally pompous charges. The mother did not feel that these were as serious as the charges made against Salim when he had been arrested at seventeen in his own country. She remained silent, looked gravely at her husband, and breathed deeply, thinking excitedly, What is essential is that he is alive. He is safe. All the prisons in the world don’t matter! He’ll get out! Then finally she asked softly, “Metz, in Lorraine—isn’t that near … Verdun?”

  “Verdun?” the father repeated, surprised.

  “The seer, the one in our town …”

  Stammering then in confusion but at the same time calm again, she explained, or rather admitted, that the last time she and her daughter had visited their town, she had met with Lla Rkia, who had “seen” Salim “on the road to Verdun,” she repeated almost triumphantly.

  So the news of the arrest of their son did not really arouse either anxiety or alarm—at least not for the mother.

  Shortly afterward the two of them left for the village to visit their old nurse. She herself had a son in prison in the south, “in the Sahara” she said. They could tell from her silences that her two youngest sons (though without sighing she said rather proudly that she had not heard anything from them) had very probably “gone up” into the nearby mountain, in short, joined the Resistance.

  The nurse who was nearly sixty was ill: a weak heart and chronic diabetes at the same time. In bed, in the half darkness of her cool shack, she was informed of Salim’s arrest in Lorraine and that they had to stop worrying about him from now on (prisons in France were less harsh than the ones here), or rather muster their patience until things finally worked themselves out! She listened to the news from her bed of pain; in the old days she used to say she loved Salim as much as two of her sons put together!

  “I’m getting old,” she finally murmured. “Prison. Provided he doesn’t stay there for years. Provided I can see him standing before me someday …” She stopped, musing, then finished her sentence, “and free! Oh yes, Lord and gentle Prophet, free, the son of my heart!”

  The mother listened, showed no emotion, asked about life in the village. She delivered the medicine they had brought, took care of making another list, and then located her husband so that they could return to the capital.

  Late that evening in the kitchen she silently decided, for herself (she then would talk to her almost adolescent daughter about it before laying the groundwork for getting the husband’s permission), yes, she made a firm and irrevocable decision. If her son had to remain in jail for years, well then, she would go there “even alone if necessary!” because her husband, who had just left teaching, would be less free than before over summer vacation. The next evening, finishing up the dishes, and this time with the young girl there, she repeated, “I will go alone, unveiled—now I know that I will—alone into every one of the prisons they put him into!”

  “You’ll take me with you!” the daughter interrupted, hardly surprised at her mother’s resolution.

  And so, for the mother, the news of Salim’s imprisonment meant that she could anticipate the beginning of an adventure …

  She slept peacefully when they returned from the village. After market the next day she talked about it with her only friend, the woman who ran the pharmacy. She bought some aspirin and began tentatively to study the different models of sunglasses. (It would be summer when she went, and it felt easier to think of herself suddenly off the boat, taking the train, without her veil now but with her face blocked at least by dark glasses.) The Frenchwoman left the last customers with her assistant and showed the mother into the back of the shop. The news of the son’s arrest was reported, explained. “So,” said the mother, “I’m right not to be too worried?” and she watched the expression on the pharmacist’s face. Then, without waiting, she came ou
t with her prepared sentence: “My son is a political prisoner!” She repeated the last words, trying them out, and watched for any little reaction in the woman she was talking to, who, of course, remained friendly; to be a “political prisoner” was noble, not shameful. Would the Europeans who were less well disposed have the same reaction as her friend?

  She would have liked to talk about her projects, just to be encouraged. Would her husband, if he could not get away and go to France for a holiday, let her travel alone, in short, in his stead? But she did not talk about it anymore this time. On her next visit in three or four days there would be fewer customers. Then she would mention it. She would explain that she felt strong. She would seek some comforting reassurance.

  That evening, in the kitchen when she and her daughter finished putting everything away, she whispered to her a little impishly, with a knowing smile, “Find us a map for the city of Metz. Because I’ve had an idea. We’ll go to Alsace for ‘rest and relaxation’! That’s not far away, is it? Your father will let us, I’m sure!”

  She went to sleep imagining the high façade of the prison in Metz: not gray, not black, a tall building, of course, but with a gracious air, a bit like a deluxe hotel where her son was staying, where she would cheerfully go …

  When mid-July arrived in 1959, the father, emotional over letting them go on such a long trip alone, accompanied the mother and his daughter to the boat. During the crossing in their second-class cabin the mother watched over her daughter, the daughter watched over her mother—she was elegant and seemed so young. The pieds-noirs passengers, especially, thought the adolescent, would never guess that this lady in a flowered summer suit just a few weeks earlier, in Caesarea, had been just as elegant but in a different way. Reigning in the first rank of guests seated like gods around the musicians as they celebrated the seventh day after the birth of her youngest nephew, she was an Andalusian Moorish woman! In which place are we playing a role? Is it there among the family or here on this boat among these passengers who think we are tourists like themselves? And the mother, who stayed in the cabin, absolutely convinced that she was going to be seasick despite the sea’s being clear and so calm, the mother advised her young daughter, who wanted to go up on deck, “Be careful! Don’t talk to strangers, but if it becomes unavoidable then don’t mention the real reason for our trip, that is, your brother! Not that you should be ashamed, to the contrary! We are proud of it! But you never know. We are two women alone, and among ‘them’ they might take us for what they call fellaghas! Remember, we are going for our health to a treatment center in the Vosges, and besides, it’s really the truth!” She delivered her advice in Arabic, then lay down. It had been bound to happen: Unable to sleep, nauseated, she would not doze off until they took the train from Marseilles the next day. Her daughter acquiesced and went up on deck, where she stayed alone for hours, filling her eyes full of the night that made the waves sparkle.

  Two days later, silent, united, and so weary, they arrived at the clinic at Trois-Épis. They expected to spend three weeks there. The first week they expected the letter from Metz. It came.

  Salim had written them (in his splotchy handwriting, stamped over here and there by the prison censor) advising them not to come see him. He was well; he said so two or three times. But he explained that the present conditions of detention were very harsh, that his “brothers” (that was his word, just before something deleted by the censor), “forty of them” he said after the crossed-out word, which his young sister finally read or guessed at, “are organizing!”

  “Yes, I’m sure that what he wrote is that they are organizing, and those men, the administration, crossed out the word!”

  “Which means?” the mother asked, and her daughter tentatively explained that probably the prisoners were going on strike, they must be demanding political rights or even just a better quality of life.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to see us, it’s because this is a bad time! It’s just the way it is—even in prison they are still part of the struggle!”

  Then the mother collapsed on the bed in the room they shared and cried. She sobbed. Right before the startled eyes of her youngest daughter she let herself go. Then she pulled herself together, dried her face, and apologized. After a while, feeling guilty for her weakness, she proposed that they take an excursion this next Sunday: “We’ll even go to Germany if you’d like, and we’ll send your brother a postcard from there!”

  The visit ended on a sad note. They decided not to go through Paris and spend the three days they had planned with friends, an emigrant family. They sent everything they had brought for Salim in several packages, including the things his girl cousins had knitted for him. As for the money, the pastries, and food from home that they should have carried him “in our hands,” moaned the mother softly, they sent all of that the day after they received the letter from Salim that was so disappointing.

  A year went by in Algiers: the everyday life of war baring its teeth in the countryside, in the mountains set on fire with napalm where the resistants were hanging on in caves, where the peasants were brought down from the mountains and placed in camps under supervision. In the capital fear was a diffuse, gray fog, and it stayed that way for a long time, until later, somewhat later, one exuberant December. (The days of barricades on which, among the children and women who fell beneath the bullets, they flew the new flag, and its red and its green …) Later!

  Before all of that the father kept up a regular correspondence with his son’s lawyer, and this time the mother looked as if she were resigned. She only talked about Salim when she was in Caesarea among women, her friends, who knew that she would not, certainly not, give up on making the trip to see her only son. The son who was “safe,” she called it, rather than “imprisoned,” because as months went by, how many young people around her, how many grown men would leave, disappear, be abducted! Even her brother (her half brother through her father), M’Hamed, her favorite because of his kind heart and his beauty. One day the French army searched the bus he had taken between Caesarea and Hadjout. They pulled him off the bus and took him and two other men, like him in their forties, into the nearby forest! Their bodies were never found; the lawyer assigned to the case had searched for some trace in all the prisons around. After six months there was still nothing! Our mother regularly went to Hadjout to see her sister-in-law and her four little ones—all of the relatives there certainly considered her a widow with orphans already. But the hardest thing was this: You could not weep for M’Hamed openly; he had no right to the ritual, even if his body was departed! “No,” her husband declared, “we have to hope for M’Hamed, we have to keep on searching!”

  They came home from Hadjout, or from Caesarea, and there was a letter from Salim waiting for them with news that seemed banal, nothing unusual. He thanked them for the packages; he mentioned, as always, that he shared everything with his comrades. We pool everything we have, he wrote—and at least that was something, said the young sister when she came home from lycée and read the message in her turn—the fact that the usual censorship had left them those comments!

  The mother no longer said anything—except in her regular conversations with the pharmacist, who sometimes came upstairs at tea time. The mother said nothing for that entire year; she endured patiently until finally the summer of 1960 arrived.

  The mother left again in July, for the same treatment center, this time alone—her fourteen-year-old daughter had been sent to a summer camp for adolescent girls in the Pyrenees.

  As soon as the traveler checked in at the Trois-Épis, she informed the housekeeping staff that she would leave the following Saturday, that she would return after the weekend, and that while she was away she would be in Metz. She took the train, then at the station she asked for the bus “to the prison.” She spoke now with no accent; her light chestnut-colored hair and her clothing from the most elegant shop in Algiers made people think not so much that she was a Frenchwoman
(at forty, she seemed at least ten years younger, looking chic and a little tense) but rather a bourgeois from northern Italy or a frenchified Spaniard.

  She arrived at the gates to the prison. Paying no attention to the posted schedules, she rang the bell and waited, her heart pounding. The caretaker behind his glassed-in station greeted her with surprise: “What about the schedule? What about visiting days?” Despite her ladylike appearance that led one to believe she was a teacher, a lawyer’s or magistrate’s wife, she explained in a voice that was almost a little girl’s (she was working so hard in this language), “I have come a long distance! From farther away than Strasbourg! I traveled yesterday and all this morning. I want to see my son.”

  She gave Salim’s name.

  “Your papers!” the guardian demanded, loud and gruff.

  Somewhat disconcerted by the Arab name because he recognized it as belonging to one of the “agitators,” he could not understand: This lady seemed so well-mannered! Her, the mother? This almost-blond young woman who looks …

  He watched her in silence, beginning to feel spiteful. She waited, forcing her face to reveal little of the agitation the wait was causing her: A fiancée, the suspicious man thought vaguely. She doesn’t look like a mother, not one from over there!

  He ended up by telephoning to explain that there was a young lady there who claimed to have been traveling since the day before … She said she was “ ‘the mother of Salim,’ the young ringleader.” These prison inmates had spent the last year in a struggle for their status as “political prisoners,” which they ended up getting. They had even begun to set up courses in Arabic. “They’re pretentious on top of it all!” muttered the man awaiting his instructions, his eye on the visitor. The answer was not long in coming.