So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  We arrived. She chose to wait for me nearby at the home of one of her cousins, a woman of almost forty who was pregnant again. “She is making babies at the same time as her daughter-in-law, and in the same apartment!” she commented disapprovingly.

  My mother was my guide. She led me, outside, in the jungle of the city, in the minefield of new laws, without suspecting that this time it was the energy of her own mother, now departed, that had driven me forward, almost with my eyes blindfolded.

  A few days later I appeared before the cadi for the scene known as “the attempt at reconciliation.” I see myself seated facing the magistrate’s desk; my husband, who came in shortly after me, is seated to the side. I feel him; I do not look at him.

  The representative of the law spouted a long speech in a form of Arabic that is referred to as literary. All that I got of it was its stiffness and its hollow circumlocutions while the man’s eyes, prying and suspicious behind black-framed glasses, goaded me. I take myself somewhere else: It is such a beautiful day, outside the window!

  Then the husband and the cadi speak together, man to man: I am vaguely aware that this humming sound is a spider’s web being put in place. The judge asks me one last question, which he repeats. I merely say “Lla!” (“No”!) because I have the ludicrous and in fact ill-timed notion that this is the beginning of the chahadda—according to them, the words of submission. So I will only say one word in their learned language: no, non, lla!

  I also remember that my innocence as a woman finally dawned on me and seemed obvious: I shall add nothing, I decided. I erased this face of justice from my sight, and at once my heart flew far away, outside the window, like swallows in flight. I tried to contain the smile that was about to break out on my face. The cadi examined the beginnings of this glow relaxing my features, or he saw into it.

  Then I told my lawyer, who had waited at the door, how I had maintained my silence and why. It was this shadow of a smile, she explained to me later, that justified for the magistrate a verdict of separation, ruling that the “fault was mine” as well. As for myself, when I left this mahakma at midday, all I saw outside was the sun. And a second later I felt its actual heat, its vibration almost exploding against me, right in the chest.

  My mother went with me the next day to the airport: In Paris my young sister had just given birth.

  When I entered the room in the Paris clinic, the first thing I saw was the baby: She was up and naked and her head was covered with curly hair. The nurse laughed heartily as she wrapped the blanket around her flushed skin. My niece was less than two days old. I did not dare touch her then or caress her … For the next week I slept listlessly at my sister’s. Forget everything. Especially do not discuss with her any of the upheaval in my life. My lawyer, whose sister, Djamila, is very close to my sister, had asked me, “Have you talked to your sister about … about the night of the crisis?”

  “Yes,” I said. I had talked to her about it in an ironic manner. My face was not swollen anymore, my hands were out of their bandages, but how could one explain this on the telephone, from so far away? I felt only cold irony about my stupidity. Because we could not spend hours on the telephone, I had shortened the story. I tried to think of some novels we had read together, or one of us first, then the other, at home … I ended up explaining: “You know, without being aware of it, I started to act out the princess of Cleves with my husband! Well, everybody—and he first among them—believed that I had chosen to play the part of the domesticated shrew! A simple mistake of repertory!” Then I laughed.

  I laughed for the first time, after having spent days waiting to recover, my body more or less intact, and my face where, thank God, my eyes could still see!

  “I laughed,” I said again to my lawyer, who ventured a more specific question: “Your sister listened; do you know how she reacted afterward?”

  “No,” I said, “There was a long silence on the other end … I hung up finally; I did not want to upset her too much!”

  “I found out later, through Djamila, who saw her in Paris. Your sister began to cry. Silently crying. She didn’t have the strength to speak to you. She cried, she told Djamila, because of her earlier fear and also because she was relieved!”

  I remained silent there with my lawyer: my new friend—she whose sister seemed so close to my young sister, who for the past two years had been happily married in Paris, now with a magnificent baby. It was then, I think, that I decided to go and spend a week with her. To reassure myself that she was happy.

  Sisterhood: Would that be the hidden, but calm, and infinitely open, eye that waits beneath the silent tide of friendship?

  Sisterhood does not mean being permeable to each other, and certainly not sharing each others gloom. No. It just initiates some friability of emotion, where emotion flickers in two places at once.

  Hands, gestures, smiles are slow to speak. A resemblance that, despite kinship or a shared childhood, is gradually revealed, abruptly unveiled: a sun after rain.

  The days in Paris were good for me, a brief spell in which I was always outside. Carefree and relieved to be free; above all happy to have kept my sight. Walking in the crowd and looking greedily, to the point where I forgot myself. The wonder and elation of knowing I, a woman, was an anonymous passerby, a foreign passerby! As a result of seeing new things, multitudinous things, the repetition of landscapes and faces, I become nothing but gaze!

  I returned home. I decided to propose a “semi documentary” project finally, one that would feed on my investigations and my research with sound.

  In the building where I had once worked for several months, I introduced myself and the twenty-page dossier I was championing to the man responsible for production.

  “What title do you have for your outline?” the producer asked indifferently.

  “Arable Woman,” I replied.

  THE WOMAN WHO GOES AWAY

  Algiers once again, home base. Going somewhere else, and always coming back! On one of these later homecomings I recall the face of a neighbor, a young woman living like myself on the fringes of transience in this oblique city, this capital always on the brink of some fever.

  Why would I suddenly linger over this neighbor, my only friend in the old days? The old days, in my other life, that is, before the breach introduced by this passion in the process of being obliterated (during which I was alone, but also so little receptive to others …). Swallowed up in my youth, that is, absent in some way, or distracted, or immobile: The only things I seemed to put myself into were the air, the clouds, the unknown faces floating before me! As if I had no roots, as if I never touched the ground, except at night, sometimes, and in the revived voluptuousness of love …

  And yet this friend suddenly appeared. Hania, which means the peaceful or the pacified: anyhow she sought her peace however she could. Her round face with large, shining eyes, a thick short nose, high cheekbones, jet-black hair that hung to her waist or was arranged in two soft braids that her hands would play with; her always-questioning eyes … Hania could not forget her oasis near Biskra. Like André Gide, who was preyed on by temptations in an earlier time, she would return there regularly believing that only there was she really herself.

  She lived in a crowded, low-rent building, where I would come for her regularly. She asked me about my life, and then about my work: photographing the peasant women from the mountains of my childhood, what was I going to do with that? she demanded to know. I tried to say how much I liked to look at the people, as if I were seeing them for the first time, when I came “home.” “The people?” she said, looking at me with her devouring gaze.

  “The people out there!” I answered. “Old people, children, little girls, adolescent girls, people who are out there, and outside this city with its incessant noise!” She listened to me.

  I had to explain that, apart from my students and a few technicians, while I did my research during the past few months, I had seen practically no one. My parents. The children. Five or six
friends, men and women. That was all. I felt I was living a full life.

  “And all the others?” She made a face and a mocking gesture, her arm in the air.

  I did not understand. She made the gesture again, a bit like a clown, suddenly so expressive.

  “The people ‘upstairs’?” I translated.

  “The ones in charge,” she said. “The ones who have solta!”

  I smiled. I remembered the expression that was several centuries old. I said it in Arabic, its music resounding like steel. “Dhiab fi thiab! As el Maghroui said!” To myself I repeated, bitterly, Wolves in men’s clothing!

  She laughed for a long time. And with that she right away became my friend. And so she poured out her life story. All I can remember of it now is one detail that leaped in my face.

  She gave birth regularly every two years, sometimes with even greater frequency than that. All her pregnancies wore her out; no, she would not have an IUD inserted, “a steel thread in my belly, oh no!” As for the Pill, she did not know how to count the days of her cycle. So, once again, she laughed, then suddenly stopped her shrill laughter, looked at me, finally unburdened herself:

  “The nausea had just begun, I am in the second month, hardly farther along, I ask my husband”—(she said in fact, “I ask Him”!)—to go there, to the douar that is my home. He refuses: his mother also refuses, because with me gone she will have to take care of the children—four, soon five now! In the fourth month, or a bit later, without meaning to, I lose my voice! Oh, I am normal, I work, I face the work. It is only that, once my belly becomes heavy, my voice goes away … And I know what it is doing, it has left and gone to the oasis, ahead of me! The children cry because they can’t hear me anymore; sometimes one of them refuses to eat, another gets sick. My mother-in-law is the one, finally, who pleads for me: ‘Let her go back to the oasis long enough to give birth!’

  “And every time it is the same thing: I leave this city, I go to my people; when I am there, I speak hardly at all, but my voice comes back like a trickle, a tiny, thin trickle. Above all, I give birth among my sisters, with my mother and my aunt at my bedside. On the seventh day, after having finally presented the baby to the day and naming him, we dance the whole night long beneath the palm trees near the oued! I revive! And the baby then is so beautiful, full of vigor. I come home full of confidence. Every morning I sing …” (She is silent.) “But hardly have I weaned my child—at six months or a little older—and feeling light hearted, when unfortunately, in no time at all, the nausea is back; I’m pregnant all over again!”

  She was silent. She did not laugh anymore. She sighed.

  “Next time,” she muttered, her voice hard, “I hope to have a good miscarriage, or else to stay there and never come back to Him!”

  In fact she had a miscarriage the next year. Three days later they carried her off, dead. Thirty years old and with five children already, all of them still very young.

  She was buried in her village near the oued. Her face is the one surfacing within me; I hear again her inexhaustible laughter in the low-rent building where I find the mother-in-law who tells me what happened. I was not there in the city when the pallbearers took her away under a shroud, her face toward the sky. Her voice went ahead of her to the oasis, I am sure.

  COMING OF AGE

  Should one tell, O mother (why do I suddenly speak as if I were the one, the dead child, the child never mourned, the child buried without my knowing how to find any trace of it again?) yes, do you have to be reminded, O mother, that you were worried about me from the time I was twelve until I was fourteen, waiting for my blood, my menstrual blood?

  In vain. I had a bloodless adolescence, a bloodless coming of age, the way one would describe a death as bloodless. Later, well after my marriage, the gynecologist explained that one legacy of this land was that very young girls contracted the tuberculosis bacillus without anyone knowing, and they would only find out later, sometimes too late, that genital tuberculosis made them sterile wives. I gladly accepted the verdict: I would therefore be miraculously sterile, available to be a bosom friend to children, all heart, and never any blood!

  So my coming of age made my life easier, allowing me to think of myself as androgynous for a rather long time. A gift. One that I expressed in the ignorance and haziness of a mind steeped in mystical reading (a jumble of Claudel and Jalal-ud-din Rumi) that day I turned fourteen, when proudly, too proudly, I wrote out my life project in black and white, Until I am thirty!

  So, intoxicated with space and motion, I dreamed my life; I danced my little life of an odalisque who has left the frame for good, at least until I turned fourteen … And ever since? Between shadow and sunlight, between my vulnerable freedom and the fetters imposed on the women of “my home,” I zigzag along the frontier of a bitter, voracious land. I try my hand at living, that is at looking, one eye turned wide open to the sky and sometimes toward others, the other eye turned inward where it rediscovers, farther and father back, the funeral processions of yesterday, and the day before yesterday …

  MATERNITY

  Any number of interviews, meetings back to back, dozens of forms to fill out, questionnaires explained by the social worker, read by the woman in charge of children’s services, put in order by the family counselor, all ladies with sweet expressions, but who move quickly, speak like inquisitors, are courteous and attentive, and are probably prolific mothers outside these offices. For the past three months Isma has been severely testing the high walls of her patience. After she and her husband had the same impulse at the same time and decided to adopt a child, they had found the bureaucracy trying. Now that is over with! This is the morning they will choose.

  They are going together to the nursery where all the babies are, some, they have been told, only a few days old, and some already as old as six months.

  Choosing a baby the way you choose a doll, a knickknack, a refrigerator, a dog in a kennel, a cat; no, not a cat, people give you cats—a ball of fur in the palm of your hand—or sometimes the cat comes in by itself through the garden gate, stops on the sill, rubs itself for a second against the doorframe, studies the half-light inside the home, and suddenly it lives there.

  Perhaps the same is true for a toddler who gets lost in the street, who dawdles in a playing field, who seems distraught at the entrance to a market: The child lays its eyes upon you and will not withdraw them. The decision opens up inside you like a water flower on some inner lake: It is your turn to approach, look, keep the child … Ah, such a choice (who chose whom?) would be lived as some obscure abduction in full daylight.

  Isma has dreams like this as she prepares for the encounter at the nursery. Adopting a child is moving toward a moment of slow seduction, or of falling in love. She moves into this imaginary space: prowling, visiting a friendly house, leaving it. Where would it be? In what place open to every wind would she find herself face-to-face with this child?

  Three or four years after the end of this long war, in every city in the country, and sometimes in the towns on the plains, homes have been set up where dozens of orphans live; boys of ten, sometimes older. The summer before, Isma visited the children’s houses in her region, one after the other. Once she forgot herself for an entire afternoon, playing with twins who were six or seven. It hurt her to leave them, and she made herself not go back to see them again. They had a paternal uncle, a peasant from one of the frontier regions, who was going to take them … The husband then came to a second decision: they would take in a child who was less than a year old, one of “the ones truly abandoned,” he said. Isma did not object and no longer went into the villages. The autumn rains flooded the city; the wind and its icy squalls preceded the winter that would be sunny, but chilly, violet. Isma was silent for days at a time.

  The government’s positive response arrives: They are going to have a child.

  The time to visit approaches. Isma leaves the house. She has dressed herself as if for an ordinary day. An hour later she meets her husband
in front of a nursery in a nice neighborhood. A bright two-story building between gardens. They smile at each other uncertainly.

  She makes the decision: “Let’s go in!”

  He takes her elbow, his fingers gripping the wool of the young woman’s jacket.

  A hostess greets them. Courteous reception; a few gentle phrases of small talk, a soft breeze of words murmured to swathe the beginnings of anxiety. The woman in charge of the nursery is introduced: she explains to them how the formalities will unfold, that was her word, formalities.

  They stop for a moment in an icy corridor with a view of flowering groves. Outside, the sweetness of spring suffuses the horizon striped with rose and mauve.

  The woman in charge points to a closed door. Her sharp voice pierces the silence that seems to have slipped in from outside:

  “This is the room where our children sleep! Walk between the rows and look at them. There is a number on every bed. If you see one baby in particular …” Her voice is left hanging.

  Isma keeps her head turned toward the door. “So go on!” the first lady says. “It’s always up to the woman to get things going. Your husband will do what you do.”

  The husband lets go of Isma’s elbow; he had still been holding it tightly.

  “Here we go,” she whispers.

  And what if it’s just a game? she thinks, beset by timidity as she pushes open the door.

  A deep, bright room, where the first thing awaiting them is the hospital smell. An undefined smell, not medicine but rather the stench of enforced waiting. And the silence. A few pediatric nurses in white smocks, all of them astonishingly young. These women tread imperceptibly from one bed to the next; they hardly seem to be working. Even the rustling folds of their smocks, when occasionally they brush against each other, cannot be heard. There are also the little canvas beds; they are deep and hide their contents. Tightly clasped in these two rows lies something like an evanescent secret …