by Assia Djebar
It’s strange: now that you’ve decided to sleep, I wonder, “You arrived when you were, say . . . no older than nineteen. For your first girl was born in Rouen, and the second was born in Mascara the next year. So you were less than twenty years old in 1941 or 1942, I believe. You had me, your first boy, in 1943. (You informed me that on this occasion, Father wanted to put the Muslim name first: “Karim!” he decided, “and after, you choose a second first name!” In a voice that was low—hasty and low—you replied, “Armand, it will be Armand!” Later, you admitted to me, “But you see, maybe because Armand came second, it wasn’t the same, and so for me you became Titi. Not Karim or Armand, Titi!”)
We came to Oran seven years later. Father was appointed civil court attendant, thanks to the positions he held in the army and, it should be said, to his relations with the gentlemen from the staff who were still hunting enthusiasts.
Up to when I left Algeria at twenty-four, I never knew you to have friends, Félicie, not among the French women, nor among the “natives,” as people said. Among us, in the Miloudi tribal family—a spin-off of the el Mahdi clan, enemies of the Chograne—you remained, you are still “la Française” (the word is pronounced with respect) or else “Mohammed’s wife,” the one who welcomes everyone and helps out, the one who would go quietly to buy the pairs of canvas shoes when the earlier “events” were taking place. (“Yes, give me four pairs, I have four big boys. They’re going hunting with their father . . . and the colonel!”) In the pharmacies, you’d place orders for 90 percent alcohol by the liter, bandages, iodine bottles. Everything the Arabs couldn’t buy. We boys would fill up the shopping baskets with all this and transport them to our father’s village, and then this merchandise, this entire drugstore, was passed on to the maquisards.
And again, thanks to the pension you got as the widow of a French army sergeant-major (seventeen years of service), over these past ten years you would buy perfumes for the women, floral print and moiré fabrics, slippers, lingerie for future brides, and toys and baubles for the infants and bring them from Paris to Oran, then up to Beni-Rached. And, as I recently learned from Ourdia, you gave out money to some of the village widows who had no sons living with them. This way, they could make their pilgrimage to Mecca! These women were the same age as you, and you’d rarely speak with them. (You couldn’t correctly pronounce the merest Arabic word. You even call your husband “Môh,” a suspended syllable that, depending on the day, brims over with tenderness or sarcasm.) These villager women used to come to the court building so that you could give them information about a son who had been arrested, a husband who had disappeared or been tortured, or a trial in progress. You’d answer them in slow, diligent French, speaking in short sentences. They’d stare at you, their looks feverish, their henna-reddened hands lifting their floral headdresses above their foreheads. In Arabic, they’d say to me, “Your mother, my son, may God bless her! What she says—and in her language—I understand her!”
And you’d smile at them. You’d comfort them, have them sit and calm down. Once an elderly woman declared, “Nya, this roumia has nya!” Her manner had been wary during her visit. She’d gazed at you—cheerful, light-haired Félicie—with her black and sharp eyes. But now the “witch,” as I’d nicknamed this visitor, found a specifically Muslim quality in you: nya, something like “good faith,” I’ve been told. And now I make a crown for you of this nya, this innocence, which the people of Beni-Rached would only use in reference to you.
Mman, Félicie Marie Germaine, my lifelong innocent. Even among the ladies that I courted in Oran when I was twenty, even the first whom I desired and loved so much, Roberte, a half-Spanish woman my age (she was so afraid of her brother, an OAS activist who’d have killed her, she declared, if he were to find out that she had “given” herself to me, the Arab, or half-Arab), even this kid with immense eyes who was aflutter with love—all in all, my most beautiful memory as a man, which I only mention because you’re not awake—even Roberte didn’t have your nya, your innocence. Félicie, my queen!
4
When the villagers would leave after two or three days of visiting, you wouldn’t complain about this work, but you would spend more time on your appearance, gracefully arranging your abundant hair and going back to your observation post in front of the window. Our street was one of the liveliest.
Do you remember, Mman, how in those days I would go with you on Sundays to the cathedral for Mass? It was only two steps away. We just had to cross our street and the Boulevard Magenta. You would be dressed like a lady. I remember your embroidered white collars, and even, I believe, a cape of pale yellow lace. You’d inspect my appearance with care. (I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I became narcissistic . . .) I’d add a silk scarf, arranged carelessly around my neck, and you were happy. (I told myself: “Not for your God, for you!”) I’d accentuate my hair in the front by crimping it, as was the style.
“Let’s go, Titi, my chou!” you’d say, taking my arm.
When you went in for the service on those Sundays, I never would have thought that you needed me to face the others—that is, the Catholics—like you. They themselves had come as entire families. Some of them were surely sizing you up from out of the corners of their eyes. I was sure you were the most beautiful, and I was proud to be by your side. Then, growing weary of their hymns and their formalities, I’d contemplate you. Like you, I’d kneel on the prie-dieu. I was circumcised at seven years old, and Father had carefully taught me the Islamic prayer, which I’d practiced for almost a full year. Here, the acrobatics were less demanding. To this day, I’ve never dared enter a mosque and pray with other believers. For me, praying as a Muslim means praying alone. This is because of my father, who would crouch down and prostrate himself before Allah each day until he died, but always in his own home.
This cathedral seemed like a theatre or a strange concert hall to me; I loved the overwhelming sound of the organ, as well as the choruses resonating beneath the high vaults. Next to you mumbling your Latin (your only science: your “church Latin,” I would tease you), I was bored, except for the music. At those times I really felt like the Arab, the Mahometan, the infidel, by your side because I loved you . . . You were before your God, but right next to me.
Tell me, Félicie: because of these Sunday mornings, of this prayer where I would pretend (I would kneel like you but I would stay quiet; I was no longer Armand, but Karim, Karim!), was I really the favorite of your eight children? The only one you loved? Especially since Father departed, ten years before you? Buried over there among his own, with a prince’s funeral that cured me of any nostalgia for him!
Yes, me, Titi. Was I the only one you loved, Félicie? This time, could you confirm it somehow?
Today Noureddine, my gloomy nephew, comes in alone. He kisses me on my cheeks. He stares at me and is going to speak to me, it seems. But no, he says nothing. He approaches you, lowers his head. His lips brush your brow, as mine did just before. His back turned, he suddenly emits a long, hoarse sob—the bawling of a grown man.
He bends over further, his back still turned, and then he darts out into the hallway, where he probably sits down.
You, the idol, sleep. Pale and beautiful, for I find you beautiful, young again, as in days past.
On my desk in the antique shop, which is in a nice neighborhood, I have only one photograph. “Our photograph.” I pored over it for a long time. The image was taken in Oran two or three years after independence: me at twenty or a little older. A slim, rather handsome boy, some said (I don’t confirm this until now). And then there’s my best friend from the time, Brahim. Very brown, nearly black, a young man who was five years my senior. A charmer. He claimed he had Tuareg ancestry, but it was more likely that he was related to my father’s tribe. In any case, he was my best friend, the only one. (What’s become of him in these troubled days?) Between these two young men with reputations for carousing in the bars downtown or in the “pleasure” areas at the local beaches on weeken
ds, there is a woman with round hips in a spring dress, arms bare, rather tall, her face luminous and laughing, a mane of light hair: you. You were a little older than forty and looked ten years younger. “A fine woman,” they’d say. If someone complimented you like this in one of these public places, I’d immediately tense my fists and, to the lout who had taken you for my or Brahim’s girlfriend, I’d suggest, “Let’s take it outside and fight it out!”
This was during the time you’d come out with us almost every night. Since you had been relieved of your motherly duties, you celebrated the new joys of the days of independence in your own way—not with the patriotic songs (which were in overwrought Arabic), or in the official addresses (you and I would turn off the radio), or in the familial celebrations (everyone in the village and in the city was getting married, marrying off their sons, their daughters . . .). You’d go out “with the young people,” as you’d say.
You’d have beer after beer in the bars. There was drinking and laughter. I was made the equipment manager for one of the capital’s many State agencies, and I had been able to get hold of a convertible. The agency had sent us a section head, and the person immediately responsible for me was a demobilized member of the Resistance who could barely read and count. He gave me absolute freedom. For six months, I saw myself as important, and then one fine day I resigned and didn’t do anything for a whole year!
My car, too showy, had belonged to a pied-noir, one of the few that had been able to stay. He had to sell it to me for some bread. My memories from this era remain hazy, except for the escapades we three would have. We’d go to the beaches at Ain Turk and Cape Falcon.
We would sing on the way. Schoolkids.
When we’d come back to the house a little later, you’d take refuge in your room with Father, and I could hear you fighting. True, when you came back you were merry and usually—let’s admit it now—slightly tipsy. Father didn’t say anything to me; he’d deal with the little ones. He looked at you for a long time.
Sometimes my father’s reproaches would reach me, an hour later, from your room. Apparently, he didn’t accept the company of my best friend: “the black guy,” as he referred to Brahim. Once I heard your response and, as punctuation, your light, little girl’s laugh.
“My word,” you hooted. “It’s incredible. You’re jealous? Jealous of this kid?”
The following days, you and I would go out at night as if nothing were wrong.
Last year, during one of your quarterly visits, you confided openly to my companion Claudine: “You see, little one, with my husband, what saved our marriage was that we made love every night, one or two times at least—sometimes more on summer days, because of the siesta! And, well . . .” Claudine, telling me with a certain surprise about what you’d said, added that you had laughed, “We’d have a great time!”
Because of this confession made from one woman to another, I tell myself that when, back in the room with Father during the days of those escapades, you’d laugh, “But you’re jealous, jealous of this kid!” he’d pounce on you silently and violently. As you’d said candidly, “Every night, we’d have a great time!”
5
Now, nobody can keep track of how many days you’ve been hospitalized anymore, not my sisters, not my other brother, Yvon/Khellil, who’s just come from Bordeaux, not Noureddine, now accompanied by his older brother. To precisely track the coma’s increasing duration would get demoralizing.
We had hoped that, equipped with their technological sophistication, they would awaken you gradually and gently, like a sleeping beauty, over the course of the week. The French woman practically resurrected back in her homeland! They would surely bring you back to the surface, to the cloudy skies of the North, to the faded sun. But the days have gone by. You’ve slept.
On Sunday, Marie slips into a monologue before us all. Her voice is harsh. “If Maman comes out of it this time, I’ll be the one who’ll tell her: ‘Algeria, it’s over for you! At seventy-four years old, well, you’ve got ten, fifteen years left to live!’ I’ll persuade her: ‘The Algeria of today is not the one of your youth, not even ours’ . . . All of this upheaval today, all of these horrors! Their hospitals . . .” She turned, shrugging her shoulders toward Ourdia. “You may well say that your doctors are as good as ours, but that doesn’t mean that Maman won’t be hospitalized over there again!”
And she cries. For the first time. Silently, without wiping her eyes. She lets her tears flow. Marie, the oldest among us.
I was going to answer that it wasn’t fair to attribute her sentiments to you! Certainly my big sister, Marie, or “Kaki,” as we knew her, had been done with Algeria for a long time! Ever since an idiot (even when she had chosen her Amar and loved him, I had always said, “He’s an idiot”), playing the nouveau riche with his mother’s money, had been infatuated with an eighteen-year-old girl and had intended to make her his “cowife” (that’s what it’s called over there), ever since this Amar, instead of continuing to chase girls and (discreetly) dupe his wife, opted for the ostentation and cynicism of shameless bigamy (“In a spirit contrary to Islam,” my Father had commented six months before he died). Naturally Marie/Kaki, during the three days that I spent over there with her, in between appointments with the qadi judges, packing her bags, convincing the boys to follow her some months later, after their school year ended, naturally, Marie had considered everything, her expression hard and her red hair disheveled: the so-called joyous city that she deemed “out of control and vulgar”; friends my age as well as Father’s acquaintances, the “cowardly and wheezing macho men”; the young women who were becoming emancipated around her, some “devious and jealous,” while the majority were “frightened and submissive.” The whole world of her childhood, her village, and her father, of the independence acquired and experienced now with smugness and insolence and which she declared “rotten,” all, absolutely everything that there had been of her universe of thirty years—she rejected it. She crossed it out.
At the airport, her eyes were red, and she was dressed in black like a Spanish widow. She didn’t want to kiss anyone good-bye. “If you love me,” she said to her younger brothers and sisters, “it’s up to you to come see me in Paris!”
She was, in fact, tearing herself away from all of you, from the country.
Félicie, you said nothing. When she went out your door, you didn’t cry. You promised her that you’d watch over her two boys if they didn’t go join her.
I turn toward you, Félicie. I’m alone in the room again, and it’s a bright morning.
If you go on sleeping like this, all of your children, each of us from your “brood,” as you used to say, will behave toward you just as Marie did, bringing their baggage of deceptions, disillusions, or new beliefs and dressing you in them, placing them onto your rigid body, covering it, burdening it. Whereas Félicie, I imagine you are growing lighter in your outwardly motionless voyage.
May you forget all of the burdens, particularly your children’s. You don’t have the cure for them. You watched us grow up; for you, the essential thing was for us to “thrive,” for us to be spared of sicknesses, epidemics, hunger, and murder. That was it. You didn’t ask anything of us. You even assessed the results of our schoolwork from afar, as if from another shore.
The day I came home right in the middle of the morning and solemnly announced, “I resigned from my job,” my sisters were disappointed. They’d envisioned a “brilliant bureaucratic future” for me. Meanwhile, Father questioned me silently, asking “Why?” with his eyes after finishing his prayers. And you, Félicie, you burst out laughing, kissed me on my cheeks. “Well, Titi, now you’re free! You still have so much time to choose!”
“I have enough to live on for one year, now that they’ve finally paid what they owed me! I was bored. There was nothing to do in their offices!”
“You’re free, Titi,” you repeated, kissing me on my cheeks again.
As for Marie—rather, Kaki—she saw herself soon as a
teacher, then . . . who knows? . . . the school principal. And for her, “Algeria wasn’t over yet.” I remember, as if it were today, precisely because this eloquent beauty has just now improvised the “song of Algerian disillusion” for us, that Marie, on this bygone day that signaled my veritable freedom, had sourly remarked, indeed, had the nerve to exclaim, “Karim, he’s like Maman; he’ll be the second clueless one in the family!”
I had balked, “Clueless? What do you mean? To openly declare that Maman and I are both crazy?”
This was one of the rare instances when Father restored calm, in French, with his strong “coarse migrant’s” accent, as I’d tenderly call it.
Strange thing, I noticed it just now, Félicie: with you, during fifty years of marriage, Father used his “axe-chopped” French (to borrow an Arabic expression). That was how he spoke with all his daughters.
But with me—maybe because as a child, I had agreed to a full year of his Islamic initiation—he’d start speaking in his Arabic, which I thought had style, almost as soon as we were out on the street. I tried to imitate him, but poorly; parts of his discourse had a strong Oranian flavor (however, Father avoided the familiarity and the looseness that brings this style of speech down, down to say a laughing, easygoing directness that can still be self-indulgent). With him, something like a blanket of the ancient language reappeared—the one spoken in the village, he said, when the colonial power scattered the vassals of the vanquished rebels to the most barren of the high plateaus after the insurrection of the Ouled Sidi Cheikh, a prestigious tribe of sherif warriors.
“Right here, on this very spot,” he’d say, tamping the rocky ground with his foot, when he went with me to the Beni-Rached cemetery garden, “on this very spot . . . we mustn’t forget! My father, the imam, affirmed this to me, even if he was obliged to give his eldest to France in the war of 1914-18!”