The Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  III

  Aïcha felt elated when she woke up on the first day of the Christmas holidays. She prayed as she lay in bed under the wool blanket. She prayed for her parents, who were so unhappy, and she prayed for herself because she wanted to be good and to save them. Since moving to the farm her parents had fought non-stop. The previous night, her mother had ripped two of her own dresses into pieces. She’d said she couldn’t bear to wear these miserable rags any more, and that if her husband refused to give her money for new clothes she would go around naked. Aïcha pressed her hands together even harder and begged Jesus to make sure her mother did not walk in the street with no clothes; she begged the Lord to save her from such a humiliation.

  In the kitchen Mathilde held Selim in her lap and adoringly caressed his curls. She looked wearily at the sun-soaked courtyard and the line sagging under the weight of laundry. Aïcha asked her mother to make her a little basket of food. ‘We could go with you on your walk, don’t you think? Why don’t you wait for us?’ Aïcha glared at her lazy, whiny brother. She didn’t want anyone following her. She knew exactly where to go. ‘They’re expecting me. I have to go.’ Aïcha ran to the door, gave a cursory wave and left.

  She kept running all the way to the douar, which was half a mile away, on the other side of the hill, behind the fields of quince trees. Running made her feel that she was out of everyone’s reach. She ran and the rhythm in her body made her blind and deaf, enclosed her in a happy solitude. She ran, and when her torso filled with pain, when her throat tasted of dust and blood, she recited an Our Father to give herself courage. ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done …’

  She was out of breath when she got to the douar, her legs stung red by nettles. ‘On earth as it is in heaven.’ The douar consisted of five miserable shacks, with hens and children hopping about in front of them. This was where the farm workers lived. Clothes were drying on a line hung between two trees. Behind the buildings a few mounds of white stones were a reminder that ancestors had been buried here. This dusty path, this hill with its view of passing flocks, was all they’d ever seen, even after death. It was here that Ito lived with her seven daughters. The all-female brood was famous for miles around. Of course, there had been laughter and jeers at the birth of the fifth daughter: the neighbours had made fun of Ba Miloud, the girls’ father, taunting him for the poor quality of his sperm, claiming he’d been cursed by some former lover. Ba Miloud had been angry. But when the seventh daughter was born everything changed, and the people all around believed that Ba Miloud was blessed, that there was something magical about that family. He was known as ‘the man with seven maidens’ and that name filled him with pride. Other men might have lamented their fate: how difficult, how worrying, to have seven girls wandering the fields, to be lusted after and impregnated by men! How expensive, all these girls who would have to be married off, sold to the highest bidder! But easy-going, optimistic Ba Miloud felt as if he were haloed with glory. He was happy in this house filled with femininity, where the voices of his children were like the twittering of birds at the start of spring.

  For the most part, they had inherited their mother’s high cheekbones and pale hair. The first two were redheads and the next four blondes, and each of them had a henna tattoo on her chin. They braided their long hair, and those long braids hung down to the base of the spine. They covered part of their broad foreheads with a coloured ribbon, bright yellow or carmine pink, and they wore earrings so heavy that their lobes were strangely elongated. But what everyone noticed – what made them so unusual – was the beauty of their smiles. They had tiny little teeth, as white and shiny as pearls. Even Ito, who was older now and who drank her tea very sweet, still had a sparkling smile.

  One day Aïcha had asked Ba Miloud how old he was. ‘I’m at least a hundred years old,’ he’d replied in perfect seriousness, and Aïcha had been impressed. ‘Is that why you only have one tooth?’ Ba Miloud had burst out laughing and his lashless eyes had shone. ‘Oh, that’s because of the mouse,’ he’d said. He’d whispered mysteriously into the little girl’s ear as Ito and his daughters giggled outside. ‘One night I worked so hard in the fields that I fell asleep in the middle of dinner. I still had a piece of bread in my mouth, soaked in sweet tea. I fell into a sleep so deep that I didn’t feel the little mouse as it climbed over me, ate the bread in my mouth and stole all my teeth. When I woke up I only had one left.’ Aïcha had cried out in shock and the women in the house had laughed. ‘Don’t scare her, ya Ba! Don’t worry, my girl, there are no little mice like that at your farm.’

  ***

  Since starting school, Aïcha had had less time to come here. Today Ito welcomed her into her home with yelps and laughter. She loved the master’s daughter, with her huge pile of straw hair, her shy ways and her little basket. Aïcha felt like her daughter too, in a way, since Ita had seen her emerge from her mother’s vagina, and since Tamo – the eldest of her seven daughters – had worked at the farm since Aïcha’s family moved there. Aïcha looked around for the children, but there was nobody in the large central room where they ate and slept, where Ba Miloud rode his wife without worrying about the presence of all those girls. The house was cold and damp and Aïcha found it hard to breathe because of the smoke coming from the canoun. Ito was crouching in front of the stove, poking a piece of cardboard. With her other hand she broke an egg and fried it on the charcoal, adding a pinch of cumin. She handed it to Aïcha: ‘This is for you.’ And while the child ate with her fingers, sitting on her heels, Ito gently stroked her back, laughing as the yolk ran on to the collar of the little blouse that Mathilde had spent two nights making.

  Rabia arrived, her cheeks purple from the effort of running. She was only three years older than Aïcha but she wasn’t really a child any more. Aïcha saw her as an extension of her mother’s arms. Rabia could peel vegetables with the same dexterity, she could clean noses covered with dried snot, she could find mallows near the roots of trees, chop them up and cook them. With her hands, which were as slender as Aïcha’s, Rabia could knead bread and knock olives from trees into wide nets at harvest time. She knew not to climb the wet branches of the trees because they were too slippery. When she whistled, stray dogs would run away, tails down, hind legs trembling with fear. Aïcha admired Ito’s daughters, whose games she watched without always understanding them. They would run after each other and pull each other’s hair, or sometimes jump on each other and the one on top would perform a strange up-and-down movement that made the one underneath giggle. They liked to dress Aïcha up and play with her. They would attach a rag doll to her back, wrap a dirty scarf around her head, clap their hands and tell her to dance. Once, they tried to convince Aïcha to get a tattoo like theirs and to cover her hands and feet with henna, but Ito intervened before that could happen. They called her ‘Bent Tajer’, the master’s daughter, with mocking deference and said: ‘You’re not better than us, are you?’

  One day Aïcha told Rabia about the school and left her in a state of shock. How terrible the girl made it sound! Rabia imagined the school as a sort of prison where adults yelled in French at the petrified children. A prison where you couldn’t enjoy the passing of the seasons, where you spent all day sitting at a desk, at the mercy of the grown-ups’ cruelty.

  The girls ran through the countryside and nobody asked them where they were going. Thick, sticky mud clung to their shoes and they found it harder and harder to keep moving. They had to use their fingers to remove the clay from their soles, and the feel of it made them laugh. They sat at the base of a tree, tired out, and wearily dug little holes with their index fingers, discovering large earthworms that they crushed between their fingers. They always wanted to know what was inside things: in the bellies of animals, in the stems of flowers, in the trunks of trees. They wanted to cut the world open in the hope of revealing its mystery.

  That day, they talked about running away, going on an adventure, and they laughed at the thought of such vast freedom. But then they felt hu
ngry, the wind grew cold and the sun began to set. Aïcha begged her friend to walk with her; she was afraid of going home alone and she held Rabia’s elbow on the narrow rocky path. They weren’t too far from the house when Rabia spotted an enormous pile of hay just under the barn that the labourers had not taken to the stables. ‘Come on,’ she said. Aïcha didn’t want to look like a coward, so she followed Rabia up an old orange ladder on to the roof of the barn. Then Rabia, her little torso shaking with laughter, said, ‘Watch!’ And she jumped.

  For a few seconds there was no sound at all. It was as if Rabia’s body had vanished, as if she’d been kidnapped by a djinn. Aïcha stopped breathing. She moved to the very edge of the roof, bent down and, in a tiny voice, called out: ‘Rabia?’ After a moment she thought she heard a moan or a sob. She was so frightened that she hurtled down the ladder and ran into the house. She found Mathilde sitting in her chair, with Selim at her feet. Her mother stood up and started to scold her daughter, to tell her that she’d been worried sick, but Aïcha threw herself at her mother’s legs. ‘I think Rabia is dead!’

  Mathilde summoned Tamo, who was dozing in the kitchen, and they ran to the barn. Tamo started screaming when she found her sister in the bloodstained hay; her eyeballs bulged as she screamed. To calm her down, Mathilde slapped her so hard that she fell to the ground. Mathilde leaned over Rabia, whose arm had been deeply wounded by a pitchfork hidden in the hay. She picked her up and carried her to the house. While stroking the fainted girl’s cheek, she tried to call the doctor, but the telephone was out of order. Her jaw trembled and this scared Aïcha, who thought that if Rabia died the whole world would hate her. It was all her fault and tomorrow she would have to face the anger of Ito and Ba Miloud, the curses of the entire village. She hopped from foot to foot, with pins and needles in her legs.

  ‘Stupid phone, stupid farm, stupid country!’ Mathilde threw the telephone against the wall and asked Tamo to lay her sister down on the living room sofa. They lit candles around Rabia; she didn’t move, and in that light she looked like an adorable corpse, ready to be buried. The only reason Tamo and Aïcha said nothing – the only reason they didn’t hurl themselves down on the ground and weep – was because they feared and admired Mathilde, who was now rummaging around in her medicine cabinet. She leaned over Rabia and time stopped. There was no sound but the saliva that she swallowed, the scissors she used to cut the gauze and thread. Rabia moaned slightly as Mathilde placed a cloth soaked with cologne on her forehead and said: ‘Voilà.’ Aïcha had been asleep for a long time, her heart crushed by fear, when Amine came home. Mathilde started crying and screaming. She cursed this house and said she couldn’t go on living this way, like savages. She refused to put her children’s lives in danger for one minute longer.

  ***

  The next day Mathilde woke at dawn and went into her daughter’s room. Aïcha was sleeping next to Rabia. She delicately lifted the bandage that covered the child’s wound then kissed both their foreheads. On her daughter’s desk she saw the advent calendar with ‘December 1953’ spelled out in gilt lettering. Mathilde had made it herself: she’d cut out twenty-four little windows, and they had all – she noticed now – remained unopened. Aïcha claimed that she didn’t like sweets. She never asked for any treats at all, and she refused to eat the fruit jellies or the cherries preserved in eau de vie that Mathilde kept hidden behind some books. She was annoyed by her daughter’s seriousness. She’s as grim as her father, Mathilde thought. Her husband had already left for the fields and she sat at the table facing the garden, wrapped in a blanket. Tamo brought her tea, leaning over her to place it on the table. Mathilde sniffed. She hated the smell of the maid. She couldn’t stand the way she laughed, her curiosity, her lack of hygiene. She called her a pig and a moujik.

  Tamo gasped admiringly. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing at the calendar. The gold stars were starting to peel off. Mathilde slapped Tamo’s fingers.

  ‘Don’t go near that. It’s for Christmas!’

  Tamo shrugged and went back to the kitchen. Mathilde bent down towards Selim, who was sitting on the rug. She licked her finger and stuck it in the sugar bowl that Tamo had left. Selim, who knew how to enjoy himself, sucked her finger and said thank you.

  For weeks Mathilde had been saying that she wanted to have a Christmas like the ones she remembered from Alsace. When they still lived in Berrima, she hadn’t protested about the absence of a tree or presents or lights. She hadn’t made a fuss because she understood that it was impossible, in that dark and silent house, in the middle of the medina, to impose her own god and her own rites. But Aïcha was six now and Mathilde dreamed of giving her daughter an unforgettable Christmas. She knew that the children at school boasted about the gifts they were going to receive, the dresses that their mothers had bought for them, and she refused to let Aïcha be deprived of those little joys.

  Mathilde got in her car and started along the road that she knew by heart. From time to time she waved her left arm through the window to greet the labourers who put their hands on their hearts. When she was alone she drove fast, and someone had told Amine about this. He’d forbidden her to take such risks. But she liked speeding through the countryside, raising clouds of dust; it made her feel that she was getting somewhere in life, as quickly as possible. She arrived in Place El-Hedim and parked near an alley. Before getting out of the car she put a djellaba on over her clothes and tied a headscarf around her hair, letting it fall over her face. A few days earlier her car had been attacked with stones. Her children, terrified, had screamed in the back seat. She hadn’t told Amine because she was afraid he’d forbid her to leave the house. He said it was dangerous for a Frenchwoman to walk around the medina. Mathilde didn’t read newspapers and barely listened to the radio, but her sister-in-law Selma had told her, eyes glinting mischievously, that the Moroccan people’s victory was at hand. Laughing, she’d said that a young Moroccan boy had been punished for not following the boycott of French goods by being forced to eat a packet of cigarettes. ‘One of our neighbours had his lips cut with a razor because he was smoking and offending Allah.’ Outside Aïcha’s school, in the European town, the mothers liked to talk in loud, severe voices of the Arabs’ betrayal, after the French had treated them with such deference and respect. They wanted Mathilde to hear these tales of Frenchmen kidnapped, held hostage and tortured by the mountain people, because they regarded her as complicit in such crimes.

  With her face and body covered, she got out of the car and headed towards her mother-in-law’s house. She was sweating under the layers of cloth and occasionally she moved the scarf away from her mouth so she could catch her breath. It felt strangely intoxicating, going out in disguise like this. She was like a little girl, pretending to be someone else. She went unnoticed, a ghost among ghosts, and nobody could guess that, beneath those veils, she was a foreigner. She passed a group of young boys selling peanuts from Boufakrane and stopped in front of a little cart to run her fingertips over some fleshy orange medlars. In Arabic, she negotiated a price and the vendor – a thin, laughing peasant – let her have a kilo for a modest sum. She wanted to lower her veil then, show her face, her big green eyes, and tell the old man that she’d fooled him. But on second thoughts this seemed like a bad idea, and she sacrificed the pleasure of mocking the naivety of the people around her.

  Eyes lowered and veil raised over her mouth again, she felt herself disappear and she didn’t really know what to think about this. The anonymity protected her, even thrilled her, but she felt as if she were advancing into a dark pit, losing more of her name and identity with each step, as if by masking her face she was also masking some essential part of herself. She was becoming a shadow, a nameless, genderless, ageless being. The few times she’d dared to speak to Amine about the condition of Moroccan women, about how poor Mouilala never left the house, her husband had cut short the discussion. ‘What are you complaining about? You’re a European – nobody stops you doing anything. So mind your own busines
s and leave my mother in peace.’

  But Mathilde was naturally contrary and she couldn’t resist the temptation to argue with him. Some evenings, when Amine came home exhausted after a day in the fields, hollowed out by worries, she would speak to him about Selma’s future, about Aïcha, about all those young girls whose fate was not yet sealed. ‘Selma should study,’ she would tell him. If Amine kept calm, she would go on. ‘Times have changed. Think about your daughter too. Don’t tell me that you intend to raise Aïcha as a submissive woman!’ Then Mathilde would quote, in her Alsace-accented Arabic, the words of Lalla Aïcha in Tangier, in April 1947. They had named Aïcha in tribute to the sultan’s daughter, and Mathilde liked to remind him of this. Didn’t the nationalists themselves make a direct link between the desire for independence and the need for women’s emancipation? More and more Moroccan women were educating themselves, wearing a djellaba or even European clothes. Amine would nod and grunt but make no promises. Out on the dirt paths, surrounded by his labourers, he would sometimes think back to these conversations. Who would want a degenerate wife? he’d wonder. Mathilde doesn’t understand. Then he’d think about his mother, who had spent her entire life locked indoors. As a little girl, Mouilala had not been allowed to go to school with her brothers. And then Si Kadour, her late husband, had built the house in the medina. He’d made a concession to custom with that single high window, the blinds always kept closed, which Mouilala was forbidden to approach. Kadour had been a modern man in many ways – he kissed Frenchwomen’s hands and sometimes used a Jewish prostitute in El Mers – but his modernity did not extend to his wife’s reputation. Sometimes, when Amine was a child, he would see his mother peeking through the gaps in the blind at the street outside. When she noticed him standing there, she would put her finger to her lips to seal the secret between them.