The Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  ‘First let’s have a drink, neighbour! We have plenty of time to talk business later.’

  They walked through a luxuriant garden and sat in the shade on a terrace with a view of the Zerhoun. A thin man with black skin put some bottles and glasses on the table. Mariani poured his neighbour an anisette and when he saw Amine hesitate – because of the heat and the work that awaited him – he burst out laughing. ‘Oh, you don’t drink?’ Amine smiled and took a sip of the whitish liquid. Inside the house the telephone rang but Mariani ignored it.

  The colonist didn’t let him get a word in. It struck Amine that his neighbour was a lonely man and that this was, for him, a rare opportunity to confide in someone. With a familiarity that made Amine ill at ease, Mariani complained about his workers; he’d trained two generations of them but they were still as lazy and filthy as ever. ‘My God, the filth!’ From time to time he looked up with rheumy eyes at his handsome guest and added with a laugh: ‘I’m not saying this about you, of course.’ And without giving him a chance to respond, he went on: ‘They can say what they like, but this place will be a shithole once we’re no longer here to make the trees bloom, to turn over the earth, to water it with our sweat. What was there here before we arrived, eh? Nothing. There was nothing at all. Look around you. Centuries of human beings and not one who could be bothered to cultivate this land. Too busy fighting. We’ve been through hunger here, we’ve buried people. We’ve sown fields, dug graves, built cradles. My father died of typhus in this dump. I ruined my back from days and days spent sitting on my horse, surveying the plain, negotiating with the local tribes. My spine was so messed up I couldn’t lie on a bed without screaming out in pain. But I have to tell you: I owe this place a lot. It took me to the heart of things, it reconnected me with the vital life force, with brutality.’ Mariani’s face turned red and his speech grew slower as the alcohol took effect. ‘In France, I would have had a queer’s life, a narrow little existence with no ambition, no triumph, no grandeur. This country gave me the chance to live a man’s life.’

  Mariani called the servant, who came trotting along the terrace. He scolded him in Arabic for his slowness and slammed his fist on to the table so hard that it knocked over Amine’s glass. The colonist spat on the ground as he watched the old servant disappear into the house. ‘Watch and learn! I know these Arabs! The workers are morons; how can you not want to give them a good thrashing? I speak their language, I know them inside out. I’ve heard all the talk about independence, but no bunch of troublemakers is going to steal years of sweat and hard work from me.’ And then, laughing, he picked up some of the little sandwiches that the servant had left, and repeated: ‘I’m not saying this about you, of course!’ Amine almost gave up then; he almost got to his feet and walked away, forgetting the idea of making this powerful neighbour his ally. But Mariani, whose face was strangely similar to those of his dogs, turned to him and – as if sensing that Amine felt hurt – said: ‘You want a tractor, right? That could be arranged.’

  II

  It was very hot the summer before Aïcha started school. Mathilde hung around the house in faded overalls, one strap falling from her shoulder, her hair glued with sweat to her forehead and temples. In one arm she held Selim and with her free hand she fanned herself with a newspaper or a piece of cardboard. She always walked around barefoot, despite the protests of Tamo, who said it was bad luck. Mathilde still did all her chores but she moved more slowly and laboriously than usual. Aïcha and her brother Selim, who had just turned two, were both exceptionally well behaved. They had no appetite, no desire to play, and they spent the days naked, lying on the tiled floor, too weary to talk or invent games. At the start of August the chergui came and turned the sky white. This wind from the Sahara was every mother’s fear, and the children were forbidden to go outside. How many times had Mouilala told Mathilde the story of children who’d died of the fever that the chergui brought with it? Her mother-in-law said it was dangerous to breathe that contaminated air; she said if you swallowed it you might burn your insides, might dry up like a withered plant. When that cursed wind blew, the night-time brought no respite. The light faded and darkness covered the countryside, the trees all disappeared, but the heat kept beating down as if a black sun now burned invisibly above them. The children grew fretful. Selim started screaming. He wept with rage and his mother took him in her arms and consoled him. For hours she held him against her body, their torsos soaked with sweat, both of them exhausted. The summer was endless and Mathilde felt terribly lonely. Her husband still spent his days in the fields despite the oppressive heat. He went with his labourers to the harvests, which turned out to be disappointing. The ears of wheat were dry, they kept working day after day, and everyone worried that they would starve to death in September.

  One evening Tamo found a black scorpion under a stack of saucepans. She shrieked and Mathilde and the children came running into the kitchen. The room gave on to a small courtyard where meat and laundry were hung to dry, where dirty bowls piled up and Mathilde’s beloved stray cats roamed. Mathilde insisted that the door to the kitchen always be kept shut since she feared snakes, rats, bats and even jackals (there was a pack of them near the lime kiln) might come into the house. But Tamo was a daydreamer and she must have forgotten to close the door. Ito’s daughter was still only sixteen. She was cheerful and strong-willed; she liked to be outside, to take care of the children, to teach them the names of animals in the Shilha language. But she didn’t like Mathilde’s attitude towards her. The Frenchwoman was harsh, curt, domineering. She’d decided to teach Tamo what she called good manners, but she had no patience with the girl. After trying to teach her the rudiments of Western cuisine, she was forced to accept that Tamo simply didn’t care: she barely listened and when she was supposed to stir the crème pâtissière she just stood there with the spatula hanging limply from her hand.

  When Mathilde went into the kitchen that evening, the Berber girl buried her face in her hands and started intoning some kind of prayer. Mathilde didn’t understand what had put her in this state. Then she saw the creature’s black pincers poking over the top of a frying pan that she’d bought in Mulhouse just after her wedding. She picked up Aïcha, who was also barefoot. In Arabic, she ordered Tamo to pull herself together. ‘Stop crying,’ she repeated. ‘Get rid of the scorpion and tidy up those pans.’ She carried her children through the long corridor that led to her bedroom and said: ‘Tonight, my angels, you’re sleeping with me.’

  She knew that her husband would be angry. He didn’t like the way she was raising the children, her indulgence towards their feelings. He accused her of making them weak, spoiled whiners, especially their son. ‘That’s no way to educate a man. You have to give him the resources he’ll need to deal with the realities of life.’ In this remote house, Mathilde was afraid. She missed their early years in Morocco, when they’d lived in the medina in Meknes, surrounded by people, noise, bustle. When she opened up to her husband about this he laughed at her. ‘You’re safer here, believe me.’ By this time – late August 1953 – he wouldn’t even let her go into town because he feared an insurrection. After the announcement that Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef had been exiled to Corsica by the French government, the people rose up in revolt. In Meknes, as in all the other cities of the kingdom, the atmosphere was combustible, on edge: the slightest incident could lead to a riot. In the medina the women wore black and their eyes were red with hate and tears. ‘Ya Latif, oh my God!’: in every mosque Muslims prayed for the sovereign’s return. Secret organisations were formed to lead the armed struggle against the Christian oppressor. In the streets, from dawn until dusk, people chanted: ‘Yahya el Malik, long live the king!’ But Aïcha knew nothing about politics. She didn’t even know it was 1953, that men were polishing their weapons, some ready to rise up for their independence, others to prevent it. Aïcha didn’t care. All she thought about that summer was school, and it terrified her.

  Mathilde put her children on the bed an
d told them not to move. She returned after a few minutes, carrying a pair of white sheets soaked in ice water. The children lay down on the cool, wet sheets and Selim fell asleep quickly. Mathilde hung her swollen feet over the edge of the bed. She stroked her daughter’s hair and Aïcha whispered: ‘I don’t want to go to school. I want to stay with you. Mouilala can’t read, and nor can Ito or Tamo. Why does it matter?’ Mathilde was shocked out of her drowsiness. She sat up and put her face close to Aïcha’s. ‘Your grandmother and Ito had no choice.’ In the darkness the little girl couldn’t see her mother’s face but she could hear the gravity in her voice and it worried her. ‘I never want to hear you spout that kind of nonsense again, you understand?’ Outside, some cats were fighting, yowling like banshees. ‘I envy you, you know,’ Mathilde went on. ‘I wish I could go back to school. Learn so many things, make friends for life. That’s when real life starts. You’re a big girl now.’

  The sheets had dried and Aïcha couldn’t sleep. Eyes wide open, she dreamed about her new life. She imagined herself in a cool, shady courtyard, holding hands with another little girl who would be her soulmate. Real life, Mathilde had said … So that meant this wasn’t real life: this white house, alone on its hill. Wandering around all day following the farm labourers wasn’t real life. Didn’t they have a real existence, then, all those men who worked in her father’s fields? Didn’t it count, the way they sang and sweetly welcomed Aïcha to picnic with them in the shade of the olive trees? A half-loaf of bread baked that morning on the canoun, the women sitting in front of it for hours inhaling the black smoke that would end up killing them.

  Until then, Aïcha had never thought of this life as existing in parentheses. Except perhaps when they went up to the European town and she found herself trapped amid the noise of cars, street vendors, teenagers rushing into cinemas. When she heard music bursting from cafés. The click of heels on concrete. When her mother pulled her along the pavement, apologising to the other pedestrians. Yes, in those moments, she’d seen that there was another life, a denser, faster life that seemed tensed towards a certain goal. Aïcha suspected that their existence here was only a shadow, a devotion, a life of hard labour unseen by others. A life of servitude.

  The first day of school arrived. Sitting in the back seat of the car, Aïcha was paralysed with fear. There was no doubt about it now – whatever her parents might say, the reality was that they were abandoning her. Abandoning her in the most terrible, cowardly way. They were just going to leave her here, in this unknown street: Aïcha, the wild little girl who knew nothing but the vastness of the fields, the silence of the hill. Mathilde made conversation, she laughed idiotically, and Aïcha sensed her mother’s unease beneath the feigned cheer. The doors of the school appeared and her father parked the car. On the pavement mothers held hands with girls in their Sunday best. They were wearing new dresses, perfectly tailored, in discreet colours. They were city girls, used to strutting about. The mothers in their hats chatted to one another while the children hugged. They were already friends. For them, thought Aïcha, this was just a continuation of the world they’d always known. She started to tremble. ‘I don’t want to,’ she yelled. ‘I don’t want to get out!’ The other parents and schoolchildren turned to stare. Aïcha, normally so calm and timid, had lost all self-control. She curled up in a ball in the middle of the back seat and emitted a deafening, heartbreaking wail. Mathilde opened the door: ‘Come on, darling, it’s all right, don’t worry.’ She looked imploringly at her daughter, a look that Aïcha recognised. It was the same look the labourers gave the animals before killing them. ‘Come here, it’s all right, come on’ – and then they were penned in, beaten, slaughtered. Amine opened the other door and both parents tried to catch hold of her. Her father managed to pull her out and she clung to the door with surprising strength, her face a picture of rage.

  A small crowd had formed. They complained about Mathilde, who, living on the very edge of civilisation, surrounded by natives, had raised savages. That yelling, that hysteria, it was just how the local people behaved. ‘Did you know that when their women want to express despair, they scratch their faces until they bleed?’ No one here was friends with the Belhaj family, but they all knew about them: living on the road to El-Hajeb, fifteen miles from the city centre, on a remote farm. Meknes was so small, and the people there were so bored, that this odd couple were the subject of endless speculation during the sweltering afternoons.

  ***

  At the Palace of Beauty, where young women had their hair curled and their toenails painted, Eugène the hairdresser made fun of Mathilde, the tall, green-eyed blonde who was a good four inches taller than her dirty Arab husband. Eugène made everyone laugh by pointing out their differences: Amine, with his dark hair that grew so low on his forehead that he always looked like he was frowning; and Mathilde, who was fretful in the way that girls of twenty often are, but who also had something else in her character, something masculine and violent, a sort of indecency that had driven Eugène to refuse to serve her. The hairdresser described the young woman’s long, solid legs, her strong chin, the hands she made no effort to care for, and then those huge feet, so large and swollen that she had to wear men’s shoes. The white woman and the darkie. The giantess and the dwarf. Under their hood hairdryers, the customers snorted. But when they remembered that Amine had fought in the war, that he’d been wounded and decorated, the laughter faded. The women felt obliged to be respectful, and that just made them more bitter. As spoils of war went, they thought, Mathilde was a strange reward. How had that soldier managed to convince the tough Alsatian woman to follow him to his homeland? What had she wanted to escape so badly that she was prepared to come here?

  ***

  Now, outside the school, they crowded around the child, dispensing advice. A man roughly shoved Mathilde out of the way and tried to reason with Aïcha. With his arms raised, he invoked Our Father and the fundamental principles of a good education. Mathilde was pushed and elbowed as she tried to protect her child. ‘Don’t touch her! Get away from my daughter!’ She was devastated. It was torture to see her cry like that. She wanted to take Aïcha in her arms, to gently rock her and confess her lies. Yes, she’d invented all those idyllic memories of eternal friendship and devoted teachers. In reality her teachers had not been kind at all. What she retained from her school years were memories of cold water splashed on her face in the dark dawn, of being beaten, of the awful food, of her stomach churning every afternoon with hunger and fear and the desperate desire for some shred of tenderness. Let’s go home, she wanted to yell. Let’s forget the whole thing. Let’s go home and everything will be fine, I can teach her myself. Amine glared at her. She coaxed and cajoled her daughter, offered her treats if she would only calm down. After all, it had been her idea to enrol Aïcha here, in this French-run school with its church tower and its prayers to a foreign god. Finally Mathilde swallowed her tears and clumsily, unconvincingly, reached out to her daughter. ‘Come on, darling … Come to me, my little one.’

  She was so concentrated on her daughter that she didn’t notice people mocking her. She didn’t notice the eyes staring down at her big, faded leather shoes. The mothers whispering behind their gloved hands. Some of them appalled, others laughing. Then, suddenly aware they were still at the gates of the Notre-Dame School, they remembered that they were supposed to be compassionate because God was watching.

  Amine grabbed his daughter by the waist. He was furious. ‘I’ve had enough of this nonsense! Let go of that door now! Behave properly! This is shameful!’ The girl’s skirt was hitched up to her waist, exposing her underwear. The school caretaker watched anxiously. He didn’t dare intervene. Brahim was an old Moroccan man with a round, friendly face. He wore a white crocheted hat over his bald head. His navy-blue jacket was too big for him but neatly ironed. These parents seemed unable to calm down their little girl, who was acting as if possessed. The opening ceremony would be ruined and the Mother Superior would be angry when she heard abo
ut this farce being played out in front of her venerable institution. She would demand an explanation. She would blame him for it.

  The old caretaker approached the car and, as gently as possible, attempted to detach the girl’s fingers from the metal door. He spoke in Arabic to Amine: ‘I’ll grab her and you drive away, okay?’ Amine nodded, then gestured with his chin for Mathilde to return to the passenger seat. He didn’t thank the old man. As soon as Aïcha let go of the door, her father set off. The car sped into the distance and Aïcha didn’t even know if her mother had given her a second glance. So there it was: they’d abandoned her.

  She found herself on the pavement. Her blue dress was crumpled and she’d lost a button. Her eyes were red and the man who was holding her hand was not her father. ‘I can’t go inside with you,’ he said. ‘I have to stay here, at the gates. That’s my job.’ He put his hand on the child’s back and pushed her through the doorway. Aïcha nodded obediently. She was ashamed. She always wanted to be as discreet as a dragonfly, but here she was now, the centre of attention. She walked through the courtyard to where the nuns were waiting, lined up outside the classroom in their long black robes.