The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry

by Assia Djebar

  Grumbling, Brahim warned me, “Brother, you’re as naïve as a virgin! Open your eyes, pick out the fakes!”

  And he was my guide. He was my closest brother. I really think I admired him, and thanks to him, Félicie, you didn’t have to worry about me.

  So on this July 5th you had announced, “I’m leaving the young ones with you!” I had only just protested when I heard the wooden high heels of your shoes clattering down in the stairwell.

  “Leave her,” Brahim said gently. “I think that she’s sad about all of these pieds-noirs leaving!”

  He understood you. But the days that followed, I regretted not having stayed by your side.

  Those three days when I thought you were dead.

  Later, when you appeared in the doorway, your face was pale, your dress was just slightly rumpled. There was an uncertain smile on your lips, a little crooked, as you related your adventures to us. I saw nothing. I rushed right into you, even knocked you backward, I think (and we tumbled down together on top of the Turkish-style mattresses strewn across the floor of our temporary home). You had opened your arms out widely and embraced me, held me. And this made me, the sprightly twenty year old, suddenly burst into sobs. Breathing both joy and anger, I mumbled, “Alive! You’re alive!” in a fit of irrepressible tears. “You have no right! We were so scared!” I pulled back. I was making a scene with you . . . instead of Father, who was stationary, his face rigid. He remained silent but his eyes stayed on you.

  All your children arrived, the youngest ones last. We filled up the living room. You started to laugh—was it truly a laugh?

  “Don’t ask me anything. Not right away, at least!”

  Then your hands brandished the rather gaudy gold necklace that Father had given you on your last anniversary—a “whip necklace,” as this thick vine of braided gold was called. You added (dreamily or mysteriously, I couldn’t tell), “This is what saved me!”

  Then you moved away from me and toward Father, who was still sitting, motionless. You leaned toward him. Your hands brushed his face with a long caress. You crouched down, suddenly kissed him on the forehead (we were all frozen, we had never witnessed such intimacy). Yes, you got on your knees, you wrapped your arms around his neck, you held him for a long time. Your husband’s wiry face, with his poorly shaven beard and his wrinkles, and his graying, southern Arab’s moustache. You squeezed your husband’s face to your breasts. Then, in tears (we discovered that you cry!) you very loudly proclaimed, “Your gift, my dear, your necklace and the Koran in golden calligraphy at the end in particular . . . This piece of jewelry saved me!”

  Father lifted his face. His fingers touched the necklace, the little golden Koran at the end. This was the first time I had seen this part, with its calligraphy! Until then, I had found this whip necklace—so sought after by common Oranian women—not only gaudy, but almost vulgar. At any rate, not your style, Félicie.

  But amid this familial emotion and this homecoming, amid the laughter and the tears, this fetish object at the end of the necklace was revealed to me: the “Book” with “Allah” written in elegant calligraphy, small but clear.

  Father touched the little Koran gently. His face softened. He looked at you tenderly. “Of course!” he replied. “That’s what it’s for, to protect you!”

  I told myself, “She, the Christian, she accepted this ‘Allah’ out of love for Môh!” I finally chased away what remained of my anxiety. “Fortunately, O God!”

  “It was written,” Father resumed.

  An hour later, we all congregated around a low table and listened as you related the scene that could have been the end of you. After the first mysterious cracks of a submachine gun, you had been swept up in the sudden rush of a motley crowd of people crying, women whose ululations incited others . . . you tried to emerge from the flow.

  “I immediately thought: move away, get out of here, get back to the little ones! Me, the scatterbrain, I sensed danger . . . like one time when I was very young and my mother and brothers and I sat down in a little boat on the Seine, I believe, and suddenly the waves were rocking the little craft, throwing us around. I had thought, ‘We could have drowned,’ and I was numbed inside by fear!

  “Anyway, as I tried to break free, I only managed to force myself deeper into this crowd. Suddenly I was surrounded by Spanish and French women, a woman with a hat, children, a young blonde girl with her hair loose. This made us stand out. There was more ululating from the back, but it was as if it were coming from the other side, from the sidewalk across the way. The danger was worse now! For I realized that suddenly the crowd was made up of Europeans only!

  “Gunshots fired in the distance. I could see the kids, but not very well. ‘Hoodlums,’ I told myself, growing afraid. Right next to me, there was a young, disheveled woman with red eyes that were wide with . . . ‘Us, them! . . .’ I said to myself. I’d just made the realization that we were the intended victims. The young woman with her hair loose, who was just to my left, jerked backward as if about to fall, but when her gaze was stilled, I knew she had been hit in the back. She leaned over as the crowd pushed me from the other side. This woman I didn’t know, I no longer saw her—her entire body disappeared, snapped up and swallowed.

  “I looked around. The cold sensation of being in the middle of a nightmare, of no longer being able to break out of it!”

  You stopped, Félicie, then gulped, “I can’t go on! I don’t want to talk about it!”

  You buried your face in your hands. Exhausted, you resumed, “Sorry! . . . I want to forget!”

  You looked at us, as if from far away, as if from another shore. And I, Karim, the Arab, I was ashamed.

  The next morning, I pestered you as soon as we were alone together. “Tell me, tell me, Félicie. Try. You saw French people killed in front of you and by . . .”—I was going to say “by us” . . .—“by some of our criminals?”

  The tears returning, you nodded “yes” silently.

  Later, my friend Brahim gave me the details. On this black day, there had been around a hundred victims. “Once the first gunshots made everyone think that the OAS was back, it wasn’t just Europeans or people who looked like Europeans. Tlemcenians with pale skin who looked Western were massacred, too!” He added, his tone hardened, “The dregs of the city were stirred up that day!”

  In the end, you didn’t describe this terrible scene in detail to me, but to Father—now, I imagine that as you were nestled in your marriage bed, situated in his arms, his loving caresses got you to overcome the resurging panic.

  Not far from the new prefecture, two or three killers herded a group of around twenty people they’d designated as prey on this day, July 5th, in Oran. Growling, they managed to assemble them on an embankment by a warehouse. The rest of the joyful, hysterical crowd, along with those who had suddenly sniffed the danger (because half were mere onlookers and Europeans, and the other half were “natives” with light complexions who were nicely dressed; among the latter there was even a teacher of advanced years whose European elegance made her stand out) . . . this crowd succeeded in spreading out on a wide street, then dispersing, the European couples being taken under the responsibility of the French soldiers, whose orders until then had been not to interfere. They were saved. Around ten others were executed at a crossroads across the way, and their remains disappeared in less than a quarter of an hour.

  The group where Félicie found herself, it seemed, was on the way to the slaughterhouse!

  Félicie remembered, “Over and over, I said to myself, ‘It’s a nightmare! I’m going to wake up. Then Môh will tell me that I was crying!’ But I wasn’t crying. I looked around me; I was still caught up in a slow crush. I picked out a family of four next to me—two teenagers, a mother, very dark, the father with a hat, a freckled face. Farther off, an old man, just slightly hunched, with such poor eyesight . . . For a quarter of an hour, they were my companions in misfortune. The old gentleman fumed, ‘What’s this all about? They should let us
go on our way!’

  “And the father with the hat murmured, his voice just barely audible, ‘Easy now . . . you’ll see! They’ll let us go!’”

  “There were cries from behind my back. A very shrill female voice yelling, ‘My God! Good Lord!’ ‘I’m not going to turn around,’ I told myself, like a coward. With this cry—interminable—from behind, I understood that I was, alas, awake . . . I looked to my left, to my right. Where to hide myself? Where to hole myself up? Then . . .”

  And Félicie wept again. Môh had to calm her down, rock her, be her father and brother instead of her lover.

  This time, she tried to finish. “Then I felt myself grabbed by the shoulders. A robust young man, twenty at the most. His face was right up next to my neck, and his eyes were bulging . . . He pulled back my hair with one hand. I had enough time to see his other hand in the air, to . . . to see the blade of the machete.

  “The next minute by went very fast, but lasted as long as a century! The whip necklace that I was wearing sprang up from under my collar. My jacket must have ripped under the man’s violent grip.

  “I didn’t understand what was going on, not at all. I saw the flash of the blade. But everything was suspended—I was arched backward, my long hair still wrenched by the thug’s hands . . . He exclaimed, ‘Bi’ Allah!’ and added Arabic words that I didn’t understand.

  “He let me go. His knife fell. I can still hear the steel sound of it hitting the stone of the sidewalk. His hand pulled me by my necklace, forward this time. I thought that he was first going to tear off the jewelry he wanted, then cut my throat. But no, he let the whip necklace fall back onto my jacket, his finger pointing . . . at the little golden Koran with its calligraphy at the end.

  “‘You . . . tell me!’ I saw his contorted face, up close. He was searching for words.”

  “You see,” said Father, interrupting his wife’s story. Then he softly added, “It’s certainly the ‘Allah’ of the jewelry that deflected the knife!”

  “I answered,” Félicie continued. “I was strong! Suddenly calm. But still uncertain. I said, ‘My husband, Môh!’” Félicie, you finally laughed when you said this name, which you’ve mangled every day for years!

  “I said, ‘Môh, my husband, is an Algerian! My children are all Algerians!’ Then I looked him in the eye. I think I even wanted to confront him . . . not really even him—he was just a dangerous little hoodlum. It was as if I wanted to confront them all, the whole country, those killing and those who were killed.

  “‘I’m a French woman and I wear this.’ With both hands, I grasped the golden Koran, whose clear inscription had served as a shield. ‘I wear it out of love for Môh, my husband . . .’

  “He was waiting, I don’t know if he understood me . . . The ten or so others were scared and had backed off into a circle.

  “‘You can kill me if you want!’ I told him. ‘But me, I won’t leave here! This is my home, here!’

  “And I stamped my foot, like I did as a child when I was angry. At this, the little hoodlum with the vacant stare disappeared. Shortly after, a group of four men came. I’m sure they were militants. In good French, they reassured us, ‘Go over there, to the back of this warehouse!’

  “They guided us . . . A hallway with a door. It opened. One after the other, they had us go into a dark depot. There was no light, and on one side there were high windows and behind them there was a lowered metallic grate. At the back, there was a sort of laundry room and a few rickety chairs. There was a pile of cheap Oriental rugs in one corner.

  “‘Sit down here!’ one of the four men said firmly. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you, as long as you don’t go out into the city.’

  “The second added, ‘Don’t move, not until we come looking for you! There’s water in the back!’

  “They closed the metal door and disappeared. The night that followed was a long one, and we remained there all of the following day. We’d been accounted for, and we were safe. Little by little, we told each other about our lives . . . each of our lives in Oran! This was the next day; the night before, we’d all collapsed on the scattered rugs and plunged into a fearful sleep, though the men took turns standing watch at the door.

  “In the morning we talked a little and got to know each other. Finally they let us out at night, taking us, escorted by gendarmes, to the new prefecture. Knowing at last that I was going to see you again . . . You know, Môh, I told myself, ‘These French, like me (especially the dark woman, the wife of the café owner, and the old man who spoke in such an erudite way), all of these people in Oran, why did it have to be tonight that I met them? . . .’ I had never thought up until then that I could have friends!”

  “You still can!” Môh replied.

  “But no, sweetie, a week after all of that, I went—I didn’t tell you—up to the café-snack bar by the port that’s kept by the dark woman and her husband. Everything was closed. They must have set off the day after they were released. And the others, too, of course! Me . . .”

  You grew quiet, Félicie—you who managed to surmount your fear in your husband’s arms. You never brought this episode up again, nor the flash of the throat cutter’s machete right at your neck.

  Félicie, you stayed “back home,” with me, with us in Oran, whose heart was stupefied by these atrocities on the “day of victory” (the Algerian press made no mention of this drama the following days). Everything here became gelid, and it was silent for several years . . .

  Shortly after we came back to our place at the tribunal—not so far from the places devastated by a massive departure of residents.

  We stayed there for another year. Then we moved to Eckmul, and Father retired. This was when for several months, I believed that I had launched a brilliant career as a young bureaucrat.

  4

  I don’t know why, but what comes back to me from my conversations as a child, then as a teenager with Father on the border of the cemetery (where you’ll be taken shortly, where my brother, the imam, will recite the “Yacine” sura before your open grave) is the only subject that inspired Father. His voice would grow impassioned, his Arabic speech would flow like spring water, and his expression would glow, his features softening . . .

  He loved to talk about hunting trips—not the ones where he took me south of Mascara with his French protectors, no—other ones from a different time. He’d go with his older brother, Si Salem, and their father, and also with his father’s brothers, whom I never knew. They would all go hunting in the south of the sebkha, in the land of the Ouled Sidi Cheikh, the lords. “I remember, I was ten years old at the very most. Father had me get up in front of him, on his bay mare with reddish-brown flanks, that he kept for such a long time . . .”

  And so my father went into a reverie: his childhood and horsemen from ages past. He started by describing one of their horses’ qualities: “Did you know that the Ouled Sidi Cheikh watered their horses with their camels’ milk? Can you guess why? . . .” I stayed quiet, I waited. “This diet fattened them, but just their necks and their rumps; most importantly, it didn’t give them bellies! And so they retained their speed . . .”

  Then he came to the ostrich hunt. His childhood obsession was still intact, leaving him with a yearning that was almost sweet. Like a teacher, he pressed on. “The ostriches live in a flock, like all nomads. However, at the time of egg laying and hatching, they settle down in couples and stay in place. Their nests are usually in secret places!”

  I didn’t dare ask him from whom he had obtained his knowledge or if he had observed them himself. He remained absorbed by these times from his childhood—at the time, surely, when his older brother was suffering and dying on the battlefields of Europe!

  He went on, “Ostriches are fearful by nature. We always formed two groups. I was with my father in the group of horsemen who had to track down the birds. The second group followed us farther behind, their only assignment being to carry the water and supplies! Because the hunt lasts several days! Some of
the fastest horses (my father’s mare among them) wouldn’t let the pursued ostriches get more than twenty-five or thirty meters ahead. Not more than that, for hours!”

  “Your guns?” I asked, imagining that his father, behind him, would have been the first to shoot.

  And the storyteller burst out laughing. “You’re missing the point! Why did these hunting parties last for days? I’ll tell you why. I’ve retained such a vivid memory of them because of how long they lasted, because of the speed and the dust all throughout the day! The ostrich is not to be killed with guns or daggers. This would ruin its skin, which is sold in In-Salah or at the other markets in the South, making up the main profit!”

  He was dreaming. My old father had become a child again, sitting astride his father’s mare.

  “Often lasting four or five days, the pursuit consisted of wearing down the whole flock. It was just when the ostrich was on the verge of falling dead that we’d club it. It dies . . . The hunt,” Father concluded, “was over when, chasing the flock that we’d hounded, we’d manage to bring back fifteen to twenty bodies!”

  Father, stretched out on the sand near me, was lost in thought. Sorrowfully, he resumed, “As I said, the ostrich is fearful. Hunting it is just a matter of patience and of fast horses with endurance! But to see it running like that, like a long-legged dancer in front of me for a full day, to never hear the crack of gunpowder—this memory is like a dream, a game that never ended! The ostriches, so beautiful, bounding amid the silence and the dust . . . How they would hesitate at the fatal moment, how the first one would totter, would try to find which way to go, probably thrown into a panic or overcome with vertigo, I don’t know. At this point, my father would help me from behind; I would turn my head to see again. One after the other, several of the ostriches were starting to grow dizzy! Two hours later, I was brought back near the group of hunters. I saw them, my coursers, on the ground, as if asleep! In actuality, I never saw them die!