by Assia Djebar
But another starts up and interjects in French, “Then tell me—if the equality that you invoke is really without limits, what if it were a woman—yes, simply a woman? Would she lead ‘our’”—she stresses the possessive pronoun with an ironic tone—“community?”
“And why not?” the first girl replies in French. “These days, aren’t there several Muslim states led by women prime ministers?”
It’s pandemonium in the classroom. Atyka restores order. “This is neither a political science, nor a religion class. Let me remind you that we are discussing translated excerpts from The Thousand and One Nights!”
A tall, skinny boy stands up and speaks pantingly, then suddenly stops, blushing with shyness. “Can I add something? I’ve noticed that Djaffar, by taking his turn as storyteller, becomes . . .” He hesitates, mumbles. “Becomes Scheherazade’s double. And for both, it’s a case of an imagination . . . ,” he searches, gestures with his hands, “‘under pressure.’ Just as with her, if the sultan listens but is not really interested, he will issue the death sentence, irrevocable!”
He stops, then sits down stiffly.
“But,” retorts his neighbor, a brunette with a piercing glare, “Scheherazade risks her life every night. Or, actually, every dawn. But Djaffar, who has of course escaped death twice, is protecting the life of his slave!”
“Both of you are right,” Atyka responds, eagerly entering into the conversation. “With this parallel, does it seem that Scheherazade, by bringing in Djaffar, is sending a message to her formidable husband: ‘I could be your vizier, Master, I could be your Djaffar, so well loved—but so envied. A good advisor, so popular—but whom Haroun sometimes fears as a rival!’? Right away, the sultana of the dawns could also defend herself by saying, ‘I don’t have forty cousins who are as valorous as I am, who could become a dangerous political force in your kingdom!’”
“In this respect,” the first boy exclaims, this time without getting up, “could we say that The Thousand and One Nights are political stories?”
“Or feminist,” his neighbor, the brunette, exults. “Scheherazade in the role of the sultan’s vizier. How revolutionary, for the time!”
And in a joyous hubbub, shouts of laughter rise up from them all.
The parlors where Haroun el Rachid likes to spend his spare time overlook the city and the river. At the backs of these parlors, musicians and singers stand in a group, silent as statues. Separated from the rest of the room by veils of transparent gauze, they are ready to attend to the sovereign’s slightest whim.
Down below is a terrace of white marble and blue faïence. Rihan is stretched out at the center of it, next to the murmuring waters of the fountain. He is half-nude, his ankles linked by copper chains—Rihan, the high-ranking slave whose life depends on the story being told up above to an audience of one, Haroun el Rachid, who hears his favorite.
Djaffar speaks. Himself wound in the voice of the mythical storyteller, the sultana of the dawns, he describes concentric circles that are spun across time and generations, and in glimmering spaces—the metropolises that all Muslims dream of: Cairo, crowded and bustling; Damascus, refined and disdainful; Aleppo, so mysterious; and Bassora, rich in maritime trade . . .
Djaffar imagines a story of viziers and viziers’ sons who are at the mercy of their sultans. These sultans can recognize the gifts and qualities of their seconds, but also disgrace them, persecute them because of injuries to their self-esteem or sudden caprices. In effect: the good and bad turns of absolute power.
Unlike Scheherazade, Djaffar tells his tale during the day, from morning to dusk. There are many pauses in the story, and during the breaks they are brought libations (barley water and pomegranate seeds scented with almonds, sorbets of rare fruits). All the while the musician-singers come forward, reciting verses about the love of beauty, its vanity . . . stopping each time the sultan asks about the chained eunuch awaiting his sentence, or when he asks about the victim’s husband, who continues to mourn the happiness he’s lost.
Surrounding the palace are artisans and merchants, soldiers and privateers, and even children and beggars. Only the women remain confined in the courtyards and within the palace. And all the subjects seem to experience this final day as if in limbo.
After the carpenters’ hammers have stopped, the shadows of the gallows awaiting their victim lengthen under the leaden sun.
Djaffar unwinds the first circle of the narrative, the one about the siblings: two sons of the vizier of Cairo, so alike that they are nearly twins. One is named for the sun, Chems ed-Dine (“The Sun of Faith”), and the other for light, Nur ed-Dine (“The Light of Faith”), and they love each other and so rival one another in beauty and grace that they both become viziers, alternating their duties from one day to the next. They remain close, never attempting to outshine the other. Love at once singular and double, O Lord! True fraternity, of birth and heart! Until the day . . .
Here is how they, alas, come to blows: playing a fortune-telling game. “What if we decide to get married on the same day to two sisters? What if on the wedding night, each of us conceives our first child, me a girl and you a boy?”
“And what if, fifteen years later, my son were to marry your daughter?” Nur ed-Dine challenges.
“I would demand that the dowry exceed the perfect beauty of my daughter, whoever the suitor may be!”
“How can you ask that?” the younger brother snorts. “After all, he’s my son!”
The argument explodes. There is bad blood, indiscreet words are said. The older brother—who must accompany his sovereign on a voyage—makes threats. When he comes back, he finds that his younger brother is gone. Forever.
For Nur ed-Dine, fearing his brother’s wrath, had fled on his mule. He goes as far as he can from his country. He doesn’t stop for days and days, until Bassora, where he charms the vizier with his grace and fine manners. The vizier introduces him to his sovereign, who in the end gives him his only daughter in marriage. As an aside, the storyteller Djaffar remarks, “Who would dare to think that Chems ed-Dine gets married in Cairo on this very same night?”
And time passes; in truth, it alone is inexorable. In Bassora, the aging vizier retires, passing along power to his son-in-law, who now is father to the most handsome of boys. He is called Badr ed-Dine. Day after day, however, because he is bitter at being separated from his brother, Nur ed-Dine’s life is marked by nostalgia for his native country.
Suddenly, Nur ed-Dine falls ill. Feeling himself growing weaker, he calls before him his son, an adolescent blessed with charm. He tells him the story of Cairo, of the dispute with his beloved brother, of the origin of their separation. He has this family history written as a manuscript that Badr ed-Dine promises to carry with him always.
Nur ed-Dine dies. Meanwhile, in Cairo, his brother, Chems ed-Dine, has had a very beautiful daughter, Sitt. He has watched her grow up; soon she will be old enough to marry.
“And so,” Haroun el Rachid interjects, “Nur ed-Dine dies, but can the two brothers’ initial project, despite everything that has happened, come to fruition?”
The storyteller Djaffar smiles at the caliph’s impatience. Calls for a pause.
On the terrace, Rihan has awakened. He moves. Djaffar’s daughter has secretly come to bring him some food. One of the favorites in the palace, stationed behind a jalousie, has dared bring a cup full of ass’s milk to the handsome black man.
Haroun el Rachid makes a sign for the Georgian singer to perform, and she begins a harrowing ballad. A sitar player, hidden from view, accompanies her.
“O women! As your voices have unstilled me, the doves have returned to their hills,
and they did not kill me. I long to tell them my secrets.
O they seem drunk on fever or folly.
My eyes have never seen such doves, mourning without eyes that weep.”
After the song, the sultan dismisses the performers. He turns to Djaffar and offers him a glass filled with various concoctions.
“Like the doves,” Djaffar demurs, “I am quenched only by the fever of the story!”
“Oh my friend, gifted with eloquence,” Haroun responds, “I will listen to your imaginary adventures to the end.”
“Not Djaffar’s imagination,” one of Atyka’s younger students interrupts impetuously, just as the teacher is deciding to save the rest of the tale for the next day.
The young man continues, “The lively imagination is Scheherazade’s, the sultana’s! She, the principal storyteller.”
“Of course,” his neighbor retorts. “The famous storyteller has introduced a second storyteller. She’s wearing a mask, that’s all.”
A young man, quiet until now, speaks up. “Aren’t you going to tell us, madame, about the different French translations, the ones after Galland’s? Compared to them, it seems that his version was very sugarcoated. We could even say it censored the original text.”
Atyka looks at her watch; fifteen minutes to respond to this very pertinent question. But will she have enough time to finish up the serial tomorrow? The serial invented by the vizier Djaffar, with all of its variations?
“We will definitely have to come back,” Atyka tells herself, dreamily, “to the body of the woman in pieces, which has been lost so quickly among the tale’s episodes and colors.”
“What’s left?” she asks herself. “Ten more minutes of open discussion to end the course? Tomorrow, will I really have finished the tale? Will we have exhausted all the different interpretations?”
Then there is a commotion in the corridor, but it is distant, dim. A sense of panic engulfs Atyka. She quickly deems it irrational and masters it. A few seconds later, she repeats to herself, for the last time, “Tomorrow, will I have finished the tale?”
The violent and rhythmic sound of footsteps grows near. In one push, the panels of the door open wide. The entire class is immobilized.
Five imposing men have entered, four of them in gendarmes’, or soldiers’, uniforms, bearded, armed and impassive. The fifth one, puny, has no beard, no firearms, and holds only a knife—or, more accurately, a small dagger. Dressed in plainclothes, he has an idiot’s laugh and the air of a madman or a disguised actor. He appears to be the youngest. When he turns around in the middle of the group of soldiers, one of the boys is brave enough to murmur, “Look, he’s a hunchback!” And the boy thinks that the man has stepped out of a story.
Atyka is at once there, in Baghdad—where the vizier and his strange master are struggling—and here, now, in this city. She turns her head toward the newcomers.
She stares at them and in Arabic she asks forcefully, “Who are you and what do you want?”
“Inspection!” one responds in French. His gun rests in a sling. He takes out a kind of notebook.
One of the boys in the last row of seats whispers, “The gendarmes!” Later, he will say that he had the impression that they were all part of the scene in front of the caliph’s Baghdad palace. “Yes,” he will repeat, days later, “I really believed that the sultan Haroun el Rachid, who I thought was so terrible, such a dictator, who I felt on the sidelines, menacing us, had sent his guards to punish us. But for what?”
The man with the gun is still facing Atyka, who is standing stiffly. In good French, he says, “You are Atyka F., a self-proclaimed teacher who, it appears, nonetheless tells these young children obscene stories?”
“Who are you?” the young teacher asks, her voice trembling. Her shoulders twitch. “Armed, and yet you come into my classroom?”
All four of them approach her desk. All four of them form a circle around her while she remains standing, staring at them with a steady gaze.
The hunchback, like a dancer or madman, approaches the first row of students and brandishes his knife to the left and to the right (a student will say, “his dagger”). He sniggers loudly. “Go on! Go on, kids, close your eyes or lie down under the tables!” he orders them in the local Arabic dialect. “Get out of my sight! You don’t need to see. It’s the ‘teacher,’” he says this one word in mangled French. “She is condemned!”
Later . . . Later, there are cries, howls, bodies pressed down. One of the four men stations himself at the door. Another has fired a brief round of shots into the air. All of the children are on the floor, beneath their desks. Just one of the girls wails continuously, her eyes closed, her fingers plugging her ears. This highly shrill plaint of a madwoman, of a disconsolate cat, accompanies Atyka’s long martyrdom.
Standing, Atyka gets a bullet in the heart. She is behind her desk. Her voice soars, a protest still vibrant despite the first volley, the one that made the students crouch down. Just before the shot that is aimed at Atyka’s heart: “Armed, and yet you come into my classroom!”
The only phrase that Omar, the youngest student, the frailest, still hears. With the final round, he gets up. Obstinately, he tells himself, “I’m not going to remain lying down!” He hears the voice of the teacher he loves and admires.
Omar sits down with some effort. He is in the last row, in the corner. Small in stature, he tells himself that they, the hitmen, the men with weapons, won’t see him.
Atyka’s torso topples onto the desk. The armed men back away. The madman who brandished his dagger approaches her. Yes, Omar in the remote corner of the classroom, the only one sitting down: he sees. He sees the hunchback approaching Atyka’s crumpled body and lifting up her head by her long hair—her long, red, flamboyant hair—with one hand. Then, with a long and sure gesture of his other hand, he slits Atyka’s throat. He brandishes her head for an instant, then sets it upright on the desk. Watching, Omar thinks, “The madman’s laugh is straight from a nightmare.”
The men retreat to the door, exit. The madman does a savage little dance, then follows them. The door slams. They have gone. The room is silent. Except for the moaning coming from in front of a desk—that of a lost girl, a weeping woman, a nameless crone—that has resurged like a river.
Omar watches. Omar hears.
Frozen, he watches, he listens.
Atyka, her head severed, the new storyteller. Atyka speaks in a steady voice. A pool of blood spreads around her neck, across the wood of the table. Atyka continues the tale. Atyka, woman in pieces.
“Five whole days we have been with Scheherazade, the sultana . . . with the husband who confessed his crime . . . with Djaffar, who imagined the two brothers, the vizier’s sons, whose son and daughter will end up coming together . . .”
Little by little, in the silence that puddles around the voice, the students stand up, one after the other. They go back to their seats. Petrified. Atyka continues, “I wanted to tell you the end of the thousand and first night. The thousand and first brings deliverance to the sultana at last!”
And the voice of the severed head slowly recites the memorized text. “‘While she was telling the stories, Scheherazade had given the king three sons. When she had finished the story of Ma’aruf the cobbler, she rose, kissed the ground at the sovereign’s feet and told him, ‘Sire, king of our time, here are your sons! I set forth my wish that you be generous to them and that you let me live.’
“‘She bids that her children be brought to her. There are three. The first is already walking, the second crawls on his knees, and the third still nurses.
“‘The sovereign bursts into tears, holds the little ones to his chest.’”
Atyka’s voice is beginning to sound stifled, as if the words were drowning, stewing in the blood that drips and flows over the wood of the table.
All of a sudden, Omar runs to the desk, to the severed head, to Atyka. “I want to hear it to the end!”
He will say later that her last words were not Scheherazade’s, no, but her own, Atyka’s, the professor they had liked so much:
“Each of our days is a night, a thousand and one days, here, at home, at . . .”
The students have disappeared. Omar back at his desk, in his corner, does not stop looking at Atyka’s eyes. Atyka. Who has grown silent.
>
They have finally come in, two or three men in white. Hospital attendants with gloved hands.
Atyka’s body, Atyka’s head now silent, her eyes still open. (“Open and directed at me!” Omar will say to himself.) Atyka’s body and head in two linen veils, slightly soiled. Slightly bloodied. White veils.
Along with their contents, the two veils are placed inside two coffins. Two wide coffins made of palm leaves. Leaves that have probably just been cut.
The two coffins are taken away. Are sewn with woolen thread. Red, high-quality wool. Sewn tightly.
The two coffins will be placed inside an olivewood chest. A sealed chest. A heavy chest with an ornate lock. Bought from the best artisan in the Casbah.
Atyka’s body and head, wrapped in white linen, rest within the chest inside the two coffins.
The body of the woman cut into pieces.
“The body, the head. But the voice? Where has Atyka’s voice taken refuge?”
Haunted by this question, Omar spends his days and nights combing the white city, from every rose-scratched dawn to curfew.
The white city? Omar can stand nothing but white. The small liters of milk, sold in cheap plastic bags everywhere at the entrances of stores. Every evening he sees only the beggars squatting alongside the crowded squares nursing numerous babies, right on the street. The infants groan, turn their heads, and the swollen breasts drip a creamy liquid. In the old neighborhoods up in the heights, a few orchards endure. Some of the homes have been repainted with chalk and Omar contemplates only the diluted white and its hints of blue.
White—Omar’s gaze seeks it out, so as to avoid the words that haunt him, make him absent. Gone far, so far, to the Baghdad of before, where the “sultana of the dawns,” indefatigable, murmurs, and in her wake, sometimes the anxious vizier . . .