by Assia Djebar
This line of reasoning, spun out to fill the time as we waited, remains for me a sort of sound sculpture … However, the relations among the adults in this shelter shifts subtly, uneasily in my memory. So I am not absolutely sure whether my mother (then about twenty-one or twenty-two), who at the time wore the veil in the style of city-women, was there dressed in European or Moorish fashion. I have no memory of this detail; writing now, all I would have to do is ask her—she would repair or correct that forgetfulness … I am not doing so because I am trying to discover how it was that I sensed a change, some disorientation in this minisociety.
These parents were seated side by side in couples in a circle. Most of them looked up at the ceiling when there was a pounding dull rumble or the wail of some distant siren.
Snuggled up next to my father, I watched the scene as if it were some sort of suspended theater, noting the presence of my grandmother (she was certainly wrapped entirely in her veils), silent as usual, and my mother, who was so young. Her cautious voice comes through to me clearly. She is speaking to one of the French wives, making conversation, and it is as if I were hearing, for the first time, French words—hesitant, careful, uttered somewhat haphazardly one after the other—as if, in this general swell of fear, what the others felt was in no way comparable to what my mother must have experienced when, through the force of circumstances, she conversed in a language that was not yet familiar and did so to maintain her “social rank.”
On the nearby mountain German planes were bombing a point strategic to the French army, and my mother took advantage of this to take her first steps in the “others’ ” language. Maybe the way her voice trembled, the slightly labored tone to her words, would go unnoticed when one French lady—one of the ones who usually stayed home—or some other—a teacher this time—gasped ohs and ahs every time there was a whistle outside, or a bursting shell’s repercussions echoed all the way to where we were …
There was all this ruckus; and in the midst of it, like an invisible ripple in the heart of the subterranean silence, there was my mother’s emotion. She had dared break in, slipping into the talk of the others—the neighbors, other mothers—but also the language of the school world, her husband’s usual realm.
I saw that: not the disproportionate levels of exhilaration, but this gap and the rosy color my mother’s timidity brought to her cheek before we returned to the surface and confirmed that in fact the village had survived, the houses were intact, the everyday world was safe and sound …
A few hours later, curled up in my little bed, I hear in the living room next to me the voice of my hesitant mother: She is asking my father whether or not, in the few sentences she spoke out loud with Mme. Carbonel, she made any very bad mistakes … I hear her questions again, the slight quaver in her voice: bits and pieces of conjugal dialogue—they have left the door ajar and think I am asleep. Their voices mingle in the shushing tones of the Arab dialect peculiar to our city that was once resettled by Andalusians … In that language my mother recovers her ceremonial habits, I would almost say her haughtiness, her elegance. That she might have displayed some sort of awkwardness just because she ventured into “their” language seemed to me then almost too much to bear. My heart was pounding. Looking back, I felt afraid: Could my mother, a woman so purely bred, of such distinction, have seemed otherwise to the other women?
Asking her questions now, and once again possessed of the warmth both of her own home and of her idiom, she regained her confidence—as if she had, indeed, been afraid, but needlessly. And now she seemed to give in more to an urge to flirt with her young husband.
Of course I remember none of what the father answered; maybe I did not really hear it. I only recall my brief feeling of helplessness about my mother’s words. Was there a danger that they (“them,” all the others who were earlier in the shelter, lit solely by a makeshift, overhead light) had an entirely different image of her than I did, who saw her wreathed in all her graces (her subtlety, her slight arrogance, her ease)?
Them: the foreigners, and not just the adults—men, women, and children equally—our neighbors in the building at the time; the more they brushed against us as we came and went every day, the more they seemed to me creatures from some other shore, floating in an ether that was not ours … Foreigners, whose language I was beginning to stutter, hardly less awkwardly than my idealized mother, complete foreigners for the resolutely silent grandmother (who, for six months every year, in almost total silence and out of love for the son, put up with living with the “others,” whom she found unpleasant). They seemed foreign to me: But am I sure I really thought they were entirely?
It should be recalled that the foreigner, during this period of collective servitude, did not merely seem different. No, if not always seen as “the enemy,” he was still at all times the roumi. (The native Jews were excluded from this category in our eyes, especially when the women, the old people, had kept “our” language, which was of course theirs as well, that they spoke in a “broken” accent that was their own.) But in very rare exceptions the foreigner was perceived as, was received as, the “nonfriend,” an impossible familiar with whom one associated only by force of circumstances. A dense though invisible silence, a blank neutrality like a criminal sentence, surrounded him, separated us. I was obviously too young to analyze or understand this impossible passage, but the fact remains that these teachers, their wives, their children, whom we mostly thought of as “the French from France,” seemed like unreal beings—they very rarely entered our home; we did not cross their thresholds; we made do with polite greetings in the stairway or the courtyard. When my father alluded to his day’s work to my mother, or reported some dialogue with a colleague, this person would appear on the scene as if he were a walk-on from some other place. And yet that night …
I have great difficulty approaching this first memory, this night when I was three, in my parents’ bedroom. Is it a knot that I am only now going to disentangle? Is it a welt, a crack, a definitive break that I immediately tried to erase on that night when these “French from France” did not seem to me (how strange this is) completely foreign?
Nights of early childhood. The ocher-colored bed of wrought iron is set just behind the door: it seems deep to me, so deep that I sink into it and I still have a vague memory of waking up in the morning and sometimes wanting to stand up—only my head showed above the bed.
In the beginning I sleep alone in the room; through the door left ajar I hear the sounds of voices: My father has to correct his students’ papers, it is my mother who is talking quietly with my paternal grandmother. The apartment is rather cramped.
I slowly fall asleep, reassured by snatches of adult voices. Across from me the window looks out on the village square and its bandstand. The windowpanes are covered with newspaper; this is wartime. Lying there, I stare at this newspaper. Was it during this period that I began to be fascinated by the same photograph, a French military man with a mustache, rather elegant, who stared at me at length in the triangle of light carved by the open door? A certain General Weygand, but I only knew that later.
So I slowly went to sleep under the general’s gaze. When I would wake up just before dawn, I would look first for my parents’ bed: Probably my mother, already up, was just leaving the room … On Sundays, it seems to me, I would ask if I could jump into that great big bed, to be there next to my father, or between them, in the hollow of their complicity … Laughter and chatter: the outbursts of these lazy mornings have faded irreparably (no, they came back to me vividly thirty years later, when my own little girl seeks out the same spot, on those lazy mornings, between father and mother!).
I still remember an unexpected awakening from this part of my childhood.
Wartime it was and in this village the siren often pierced our evenings or nights. When it howled, it seemed to me that I heard its endless spiral bore into my flesh: the alarm emanated from the town hall across from the teachers’ apartments. Consequently the first th
ing I would do was run to the bedroom window, and from it try to focus on the façade of the town hall. But it was already night. Everything had to be closed to make sure that not even the thinnest line of light would show. My mother and my grandmother went from one window to the next, one room to the next … I sometimes preferred to sink deep into my bed almost voluptuously, feeling I was the only one sheltered (the alarm, the airplanes—all that was up on the mountain and we could not even see the spectacle), but at the same time savoring the anxiety that was so exhilarating, so deliciously exhilarating.
It was only later that we began to leave the building and go in frightened groups to the hastily constructed trenches in the surrounding parks …
For the time being I am still in these first dark nights of mine: I am not budging from my bed; I am watched by the General Weygand of windowpane and newspaper—asleep like so many times before. But one morning I woke up just before dawn; everything around me, everything inside me reeled slowly.
Probably during the night there had been some vague turmoil of which I was barely aware, but it had not awakened me. Probably my sleep this time was not clear and limpid but rather jerky and uneven, in fits and starts. In the distance voices, torn but still dangerously blanketing me; suddenly a white light over my head, over my closed eyes, then abruptly turned off; a few whispers in the dark, maybe other people. Or had I rather dreamed some new voice, the soft tones of a foreign woman and—(but it was only long afterward that I would not piece together what I heard that was not part of my usual sleep) a “French” sound. It was as if the parents’ bedroom had shifted horizontally, was half open to the village square, and there, where I still slept in my baby’s bed, where I still kept my eyes shut on purpose, I and my relatives standing around me were exposed to the four winds in front of everybody, in front of “the others.” And so France was for me simply the outside.
Finally I opened my eyes; nothing in the room had moved. However, right away, in the half dawn it seemed to me that there was no denying, because of the strange night sounds but also because of a certain stillness around the beds, it was obvious: I was waking up somewhere else, in a room that seemed the same but was totally different.
Bright daylight, gleaming gray-blue transparent lights, lit the imposing mahogany armoire whose tall mirrors had beveled edges, the one that stood there, on show and impenetrable, across from us. Tick-tock. Regularly, from the clock on the other side of the room.
Where was I? I did not move. My heart was pounding. Where were my parents hiding? I did not sit up. I did not look beside me. And still there was this absurd impression of being both there and somewhere else: the sound, the sound of breathing was different; a different silence inhabited the big bed. Then I greedily studied that hollow in the bed to discover whose imperceptible breathing was covered by the sheets … My father, my mother, where were they? In the blur of the night I heard their voices in the turmoil, or in my dream. My heart was pounding wildly.
It did not take long for me to determine that they were not sleeping nearby; the window grew bright. A woman’s hand, not my mother’s, a fat, white hand emerged from the sheets, lit the lamp, a different voice, not my mother’s, murmured.
Murmured what? Some question. I must not have understood. But I recognized the French language: I was definitely waking up in the home of foreigners!
I open my eyes, in the lamplight and the gray light of dawn. I look. In the parents’ bed our next-door neighbor—a teacher who is widowed or divorced, I do not know which—is sleeping. And what is more, beside her is her son—stretched out in “our” bed. “Ours,” I thought as if this were the final, irreparable breaking and entering in the night—occupied by the teacher’s son, a boy who was ten or twelve, Maurice. It is only just now his name comes to me intact.
So there they lay in my parents’ place, “them,” the French mother and her son, our neighbors … That night there had been sirens and German bombing in the nearby hills. In this terror the neighbor who was alone had panicked: she had come and knocked on our door. To reassure her, my parents had invited her in and had, quite naturally, given her their room. They made do themselves with a mattress on the floor in the dining room: just everyday Arab hospitality … he was, poor thing, a woman alone.
There, right next to me, as I lay motionless in my bed, a new couple were stretched out: the mother and her son … The boy was sleeping: I only saw his silky light brown hair. The teacher was sitting up in bed. She was wearing a nightgown, her ample bosom, her blond hair loose on her round shoulders, and on her chubby face a smile that was almost a little girl’s, sweet and half surprised, was turned to me. She looked at me, as if asking to be forgiven, then glanced tenderly at her still-sleeping son.
“Maurice,” she began, then she turned back to me, because, probably, I was staring at her fixedly, as if demanding some explanation for this intrusion.
I did not get out of bed. I no longer stared at the neighbor. I felt this boy there right next to me, a boy who in those days must have seemed to me a sort of hero, one close but faraway. For me this was the height of disruption—“he” was in my house, in the most secret part of “my house,” of “our house,” and he kept right on sleeping as if nothing had happened!
That night when the tumult was unable to wake me up completely, that night became one of transmutation. The mother and her boy, the “French,” were of course neighbors on the same floor but also the closest representatives of “the other world” for me; “they,” this couple sprung from the dark and stretched out there in the open for me to see, had taken my parents’ place!
Substitution: I must have spent long minutes thinking it was irrevocable, that my parents had vanished into the wings of the scenery, that this pair of recumbent forms, mother and son, were taking their place. Was I not going to become different all of a sudden? In the slow shifts of this astonishing night was I not going to remain like this: simultaneously in the bedroom of my parents (perhaps they had even chosen different roles themselves, in some other people’s house, in some other French apartment?) and discovering I was in the opposite camp?
No, I would not move from my bed, my only haven. I stayed, open-eyed, frozen. So many years later I am relocating the ineradicable minutes of this awakening, trying to relive inside myself: what did I feel, what made me worry?
The fear that one might have expected from a little three-year-old girl who imagines for an instant that she has lost her parents—this is not a fear I recognize … The excitement of an unknown world, a new mother (the neighbor did of course seem older, more of a “matron” than my mother, who was then scarcely more than twenty), no, that is not familiar either. The nearness of this twelve-year-old boy, however, this boy with whom I would sometimes play in the afternoon in the park and who seemed to me a young man, this unexpected familiarity provided an ambiguity and keen pleasure that I can deal with more readily.
So there I stayed: neither frightened nor particularly excited by the adventure. I relive the awakening. For a few seconds I imagine I am a little Arab girl (myself, my bed, with my silent, gentle grandmother close by) and yet suddenly all decked out with French parents: this widowed (or divorced) lady with her hair down who is casually waking up next to me.
I do not smile. I make no move to get up. Finally my mother appears at the door. The neighbor rises and sincerely begs to be forgiven for her night fears.
I closed my eyes. I did not want to see anybody. I felt I was at the border, but which one? One moment I was going to have a French mother, a “brother” and not “a brother”; her son stretched out close by, in this great big bed into which I liked to leap and curl up between my father and my mother. I closed my eyes. I am sure I must have dreamed that I was going to jump into this big bed again, back in my old Sunday ways, squeeze up next to the “lady,” between her and her son, next to Maurice, between mother and son, who were my parents, speaking French, breathing French … That is the moment I experienced at the age of three.
That was perhaps a year or more before I began school. This waking up, the only one from my early childhood, is still unexpectedly the most vivid. (It is oblique, its mobility establishing its fragile equilibrium.)
What were my games like then? In the courtyard of the apartment building, my voice sings the usual counting rhymes tirelessly, while with the other little girls I throw the ball against a high wall painted white. Then we play hopscotch or on the swings … I don’t wander off into the village; my father set limits on where I can go: the courtyard and the garden in front, never the street.
I think of myself as being happy in the garden to this house, with a sort of inexpressible excitement in my heart … A few trees, lemon trees, and a medlar tree in the midst of weeds; a corner where someone must have grown salad greens … We reach it through a rickety gate whose squeaking made us laugh.
It is only in this garden that I see myself playing with Maurice, the twelve-year-old boy who woke up one morning in my bedroom, next to me.
“Playing” with this boy: the voices of our dialogue have vanished. Of the scenes that come back, there is only one of these two child’s bodies clinging to the tallest lemon tree—Maurice, full of energy, manages to perch on the highest branch. He waves to me to come. His wave suggests that I climb up to where he is.
I stay clinging to the bottom branch. Strangely I refuse; I stay where I am. I am afraid of the contact. As if reaching the same branch, squatting there beside him, seemed to me in some vague way utterly sinful. My heart pounds. I am full of guilt, prickles of anxiety: In just a second my father, I am sure, is going to appear, stand there before the garden gate whose squeak I can already hear. My mother, at the kitchen window, must have watched me from the heights of her lookout post: she would watch powerless the scene in which my father would catch us at something, needless to say, I was doing wrong. I stay on my branch, immobilized. Maurice invites me up again; I can still see his mocking face. Not suspecting anything, not imagining that my fierce refusal could be anything other than a mere lack of physical daring, he insists; then I see him jump all at once into the grass on the ground, sing to himself, climb back up to the highest branch … He was probably sorry that I was not joining in this athletic competition!