by Assia Djebar
I exclaim, “I told all of you so! You should have sent her to me from the start. You kept her over there too long! Too long!”
“At the hospital in Oran, they did what they could: the tests, the exams, the X-rays. In the end, they admitted that they didn’t have any idea what’s wrong with her!”
Ourdia blows her nose, suddenly shrivels up on her chair. Wistfully, she adds, “It happened so suddenly. Her head would start to tremble, she’d lose her balance. Plus her memory would give out, bit by bit or sometimes in flashes.”
(I don’t want to know! I forbid her to describe your problems to me, Mman! Yes, that’s it, they’re nothing but problems!)
As I let this last word resonate within me with its tiny measure of hope, I hear my little sister protest, “But you’re wrong, we have very good doctors!”
“You should have sent her to me!” I repeat spitefully, and a nurse passing by shakes her head at my raised voice.
“In any case,” Ourdia replies, gaining her composure, “the funding for Paris wasn’t ready until last week!”
I open the little bag she holds out to me. It has all of your papers, Mman: your pension file, which has been in your name since Father died ten years ago, and your Algerian residency card. You, the French woman who insisted on keeping your French papers for more than fifty years of marriage and even though you had eight children, half of whom are still living in Algeria and call themselves “completely Algerian.” With your father’s Flemish name, Félicie Marie Germaine, you went to a ball in Le Havre when you were eighteen, meeting a certain Mohammed Miloudi, the sergeant-major. He came from the high plateaus of Oranie and spoke French poorly, but he was such a handsome man in his uniform! His officers left for England in that storm-heavy spring of 1939, leaving him behind in Rouen, where he married you three weeks later—you, the virgin! You’d been “placed” with some middle-class locals at an early age. And so perhaps the figure of this handsome stranger, who was in his thirties and had the pompous title of “sergeantmajor” thus opened up a wide future for you, just before the summer when the war was brewing. I know that father didn’t brag in front of you. One long, contemplative night back in his village by the dunes, he told me so in his Oran dialect (the nuances of which I understand, unlike you, of course). “Your mother,” he murmured, “I assured her of only one thing: that I was (and I still am) the best specialist in my region.” He made a broad gesture with his arm to indicate the hills and the desert, so close, beyond it. “Yes, the best specialist in horses and camels!”
At this carnival in Le Havre, this must have really made an impression on you, Mman, still so naïve: “specialist in horses and camels!” It was practically a Magi who had come to kneel before you at the portals to the church. I catch myself smiling here in this hallway, which has suddenly cleared out. Repeating “Félicie Marie” to myself, I sit straight up in my chair. I manage to get all your papers in order. I murmur, “Mman!” and stand up, choking on a dry sob.
I wait away from Ourdia until the door at the end opens and one of the interns finally invites us in to come see you.
Ourdia—more precisely, Ourdia/Louise—and I, Armand/Karim, sit down on either side of the bed where you lie, Félicie. Your eyes are closed, your beautiful face has the pallor of wax, and your auburn hair flows along your neck and over the sheet. “So you’ve made it, Mman,” I say to myself. “You’ve made it to the end of your trip today. They say you’re in a coma, that it may or may not last a long time. You’ve come to me so I can watch over you, so that I can gaze at you. I’ll keep on begging you: Open your eyes and look at me. Just once, Félicie Marie Germaine!”
They don’t know, but I do! I speak with you in silence, and you are the only one who hears me, Mman!
2
I come every day for one month—this last month—when you almost don’t come out of the coma.
Ourdia is staying with our older sister, Marie, who got rid of her Muslim first name once and for all when she divorced her husband from Oran (making a fortune off his mother’s three hammams). The brother-in-law got it into his head to take a second wife. I went over there—do you remember, Mman, that I took great pains to settle my sister’s business matters in forty-eight hours? Marie didn’t think twice about coming to France with me, and she was followed shortly after by her two sons, Noureddine and Halim. After a year of working as a secretary, she married the first guy who turned up, and within a year she had a third boy, Alain, who’s now seven.
Every other day Marie and her eldest son, Noureddine, come to visit you. Sometimes my nephew and I will both stay here, each of us turned toward your sleeping face, each of us more or less alone with you, facing you! Noureddine’s wide eyes, under heavy black eyebrows, don’t move away from you, the grandmother who raised him as a child. He’s remained so attached to you and doesn’t find a single word to voice his distress. At times, his fine-featured face tenses up, and he turns back pointedly toward me. Remaining still, I sense his plea—but what’s he asking me? He’s waiting for you, like I am, that’s all. He’s waiting for you to come back to us! I don’t get up or turn away. I don’t know how to respond to his silent tension.
Ourdia comes every afternoon and stays up to the end of visiting hours. She’s one who never stops talking. Sometimes it seems that her prattle is directed at you, your impervious slumber. (So much so that every so often I want to shout, “Stop, you’ll wake her up!” But just a second later, I calm down: isn’t this just what I want? For you to wake up, for you to open your eyes, even if it would take a wasp’s sting to wake you up?)
Usually, Ourdia angles her slight bust in my direction. Even if I don’t look at her, she fills me in on her morning shopping, her discovery of her sister’s neighborhood: “Gambetta, la Rue Stendhal, then the flea market at Montreuil, then . . .”
Mman, I almost would have preferred that the youngest, the most beloved, be a little snobbish and tell of her walks to the Louvre, her climbs up Montmartre, her ascension of the towers of Notre Dame for you, who remains immobile.
I don’t answer her. She knows that she gets on my nerves. As my paternal cousin in the village, who speaks only Arabic, might say, “This one’s talk runs and runs, a leaky faucet!”
But I restrain myself. I remember how you would indulge this baby of the family, “the older ones’ little girl,” you’d joke with Father. You were right, she’s the most fragile among us. Her insipid prattle masks her anguish. Forgive me, Félicie.
A nurse, along with a female colleague, comes in for your temperature and other tests. My sister and I have to leave. We go to the cafeteria for fifteen minutes. We cross a courtyard, a garden. I move my eyes away from the spectacle of two or three elderly people who are being taken for a walk in their chairs like monstrous infants. Ourdia also pretends to not see them. It’ll never be like that for you! Félicie will never be pushed in a chair like that . . . Right, Mman?
We come back. It’s sunny and icy cold.
Félicie, as soon as we are walking outside, your daughter starts talking to me in another voice, more serious, like an industrious adult—about Oran, its popular quarters, about Canastel and Eckmul. Then she brings up the village, Beni-Rached, and those who are still back home now and go to Oran once a week or once a month, some once a year, or for some special occasions. Ourdia keeps track of the list. Mman, did you know that your youngest has acquired an old wife’s wisdom? She recounts them in droves: the uncles, starting with the oldest, the one who is ninety-six years old, the future centenarian, then the cousins, the latest weddings and all of the alliances. (“Never any marital alliances,” she repeats, “with the famous Chogranis, those ancient bandit-cavalier-highwaymen-scallywagwarlords—pick one or more of these qualities as you choose!”) Ourdia doesn’t take sides but is up on all of the feuds, the splits, the çoffs . . .
As she provides whatever report she’s been assigned to give to me, I grumble “yes” or “no” at random. Unflappable, she continues: “Karim, do you rem
ember Father’s oldest sister’s son? The one who was an FLN warrant officer at the end of the war? The one who was so full of himself? And the young Djamila, the most beautiful of our cousins, the one that Father wanted to have you marry? She lives in Mascara and just gave birth to her fifth child, the poor woman!”
I try to stop her, saying, “You know, ever since Father was buried at Beni-Rached, I’ve been done with Oran and all of Algeria! I’ll never set foot there again.”
Ourdia breaks off. (I keep talking to you. You, Félicie. For we haven’t come back to your bedside yet. My kid sister chatters so much that I end up thinking that she’s not in any hurry, like I am, to get back to our stations before you, facing your recumbent body, which will tremble, which will rise, which will sit up, and your eyelids, with their long lashes, will start to flutter again, to . . .)
Her eyes tired or filled with melancholy, Ourdia stares at me. She’ll patiently pick up the thread of her chronicle.
I cut in abruptly, “Let’s go back to Maman!”
We situate ourselves on either side of your bed. Félicie, your bulging eyelids, with their translucent skin, absorb a little of the oblique light coming from the partially opened window. Your pale face is not masklike, no. In a second, there will be a shudder, a crease between the eyes, a wrinkle at the corner of your lips. Something tiny and miraculous will appear. (I’ll be the first to notice it, I’ll hold a shaking hand out to the nurse: Come quick, all of you . . . All of you who didn’t think Mman was going to wake up, to live again, to move, to look at me!)
Ourdia finally keeps quiet. Marie and my nephew Noureddine creep in, as if you had just started to doze off . . .
I begin questioning you, Félicie. Are you really keeping yourself in the coma? As in a new armor? You found this defense all on your own—not on the other shore to meet your husband, not really with us either . . . your eight children, half here, the rest back in the country, except for a little girl who has been dead for so long, whom I never knew.
I’m talking to you again, and this could go on all night if they’d leave me with you! But I’m not alone. My two sisters and nephew will all stay until the end.
I decide to go. I keep my good-byes with the others short. I pull away. I don’t leave you, Félicie.
Once outside the hospital, I forget to get my car. I stare at the taxis and buses as if they were driving somewhere else, not here. I walk slowly, distracted. With a sorrowful pleasure, I acknowledge that once again I’m the foreign one, the absent one. And yet, Félicie, I’m right with you as you lie up there in your bed.
As I go down the sidewalk, I’m gripped by a single luminous reality: the scent of the seeping damp on the stones, on the windows, on the chrome of the cars, but also now and again the perfume, almost rancid, of vanished flowers. Of flattened plants, of a stagnant humus—arising, of course, from the past. As a child, I really liked it when Father and I would go to the Beni-Rached cemetery, a parched garden by the dunes that was always open. On the hottest days of the year, we would stretch out in the sand. Everything resurfaces, everything is born again: plants and beings, their rare scents blended together, everything . . .
Félicie, up there among the bottles, jars, and tubes you sleep in your impervious serenity. I wander late into these wet Parisian evenings, breathing in and speaking to you.
3
A week has slipped by. Félicie’s condition has remained unchanged. As she went out, a nurse whispered in a commiserative tone, “Some sick people stay like this for a year! Yes, yes, my good man. A year!”
I come into your room, I kiss you on the forehead, and now I tell you, rather loudly, “Félicie, can you imagine what she predicted for you . . . A year!”
I shrug my shoulders and sit down. I resume my dialogue with you, imagining or secretly asking you what your dreams were this past night, if you went back to Oran during the days of the recent war. You were so beautiful then, and I wasn’t yet a teenager. We’d go out into the streets, despite the checkpoints, sometimes despite this threat or the other!
The next day, Ourdia and I leave the hospital at the same time, which is unusual. Evening is approaching. We are about to go our separate ways in front of the entrance. (This same day, it seems to me, the doctor on duty called me in and told me the name of your illness, an erudite name that I haven’t retained. I only gauged, in an impetus of concern, the gravity of the ailment!)
Out on the sidewalk, we are kissing each other on the cheeks when Ourdia challenges me, her voice acid, “Why don’t you invite me to your place, at least once?”
I stare at her. When you had come to visit over these past years—about once every four months to collect your pension, to do your multiple shopping trips for the people back there—you’d stay with me, of course. You’d always say you were coming for three weeks, and I’d insist, “Spend at least a month, the time you need to see Paris! Be a real tourist for once!” In the end, you’d stay for a week at the most. “I miss Oran,” you’d confess, your laugh so clear I can hear its rippling sound now.
“Why?” My sister asks reproachfully, standing here in front of me. Her almond eyes are flashing, but she already regrets having made the accusation.
I’m overcome by a gust of vague tenderness. I could take her by the shoulders, hug her! But since my childhood, I’ve never been impulsive in public except with you, Félicie! The women that I’ve loved in this city have so often reproached me for this.
“If you want,” I answer my sister, “I’ll take you out to a restaurant. Let’s have dinner together, tonight or tomorrow. I’ll take you out. I’ll treat you, wherever you want! But right now, it’s not fun at my place . . . I’m in the middle of separating from my wife!”
“From Claudine!” Ourdia exclaims, already sympathizing with my companion—really my common-law wife—of five years.
“That’s how it goes,” I say. “That’s life! Here, in Paris, couples come together and they separate. Only Félicie and Mohammed, who met in France, never split up!”
“I’m going back to my sister’s,” Ourdia replies. She lifts herself up on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on my cheek, then turns away.
“That’s right,” I tell myself, watching the silhouette of the thirtyish woman growing distant. “I’ll have dinner alone. And talk with you over and over again, Félicie!”
So you sleep over there. I can’t come to the hospital on one or two days, and I call the nurse on duty, my heart beating. (“If you were to choose, Félicie, to leave today, without having smiled at me because I couldn’t postpone this business meeting.”) The nurse responds, “Madame Miloudi’s condition is unchanged.” Apart from two or three absences, I come every day, sometimes in the late morning—now and then I’d disrupt the professor who was visiting with his cohort of students. I’d go back into the corridor, take the newspaper from my pocket and read it, looking for the section listing the attacks back home; they’re using the term “the events” again. You see, Félicie, over there they’re expressing themselves as they did in the past, rewriting the words of yesterday!
“Yesterday.” Do you remember when we lived in the Oran civil court building? My father was appointed as concierge, and we were entitled to a five-room apartment on the first floor. We ended up being the only Arabs in the middle of a European city, and at the time we were living almost like rich people!
I was fifteen years old. Everything was gathering momentum the two or three years before independence. There were risks and sirens, but also a kind of excessive joy. This was around six months before the cease-fire! Do you remember, Félicie, when the Delta commandos—the deranged OAS activists—suspected that we were helping the “others,” the fellaghas? That night when they attacked us with machine guns from the street through our illuminated windows? Once again, Father’s weapons and his refined hunting skills served him well. He and I were right up against the windows, and we turned off the lights and fired back with a rifle and buck-shot. They left. The next day, there were traces
of blood on the sidewalk and years later I found the casing holes in the wall under our windows.
That night, Félicie, you remained impassive, up in the back, watching over the little ones who had to be forced to stay beneath the beds. You weren’t afraid. You watched your husband calmly. He’d always been the best shot in the army and then as a guide for boar hunts. Up until these troubled times, he was the one high-ranking officers kept calling on for their hunting parties in the hills south of Mascara.
The Delta commandos—I continue with my monologue, even though one of the nurses interrupts us when she comes in to take your blood pressure and temperature and check the tubes around your wrist-bands, your ankles—how many “commandos” are now turning up again in Oran, where I no longer live? Could you have told me?
As you lie here, Félicie, one of the “extremist” groups, all Arabs this time, have just shot down our country’s most important man of the theatre! After the dinner for breaking the fast (so it’s the time of Ramadan over there!), they waited for him at the bottom of his stairs. Two bullets in the head for the city’s hero, a man of joviality and generosity!
Oran, the city of laughter, even during the days of the war, of witty banter, of raï, of bad boys and girls on the loose! People would come from the rest of the country to mix with the riffraff here. Maybe it’s still done, but not out in the open! Now they’re killing each other in broad daylight! Everything’s starting again, Félicie, just like when I was young, right before independence. That was the time, after all, of both our greatest memories!
After the independence, in this city of permissiveness, you’d contemplate the spectacle of the noisy streets, day after day, planted in front of your window. We stayed at the tribunal apartment for another year. And then you did the same thing in the more cramped quarters in Eckmul, where we lived next. You wouldn’t comment on anything. You’d smile, you’d observe.