The Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  In the middle of August, as the first anniversary of the sultan’s dethronement approached, they went to spend the day at Mouilala’s house. Amine’s mother welcomed him with a thousand prayers, thanking God for the protection He’d given her son. They went into a room to talk about business and money, and Mathilde sat in the parlour and began braiding Aïcha’s hair. Selim sprinted around the house and almost fell down the stone stairs. Omar, who adored his nephew, lifted him on to his shoulders. ‘I’m going to take him to the park so he can run around,’ he said before leaving, paying no attention to the advice Mathilde gave him. At five o’clock Omar still hadn’t come home and Mathilde, feeling anxious, went to tell her husband. Amine leaned out of the window. He called out to his brother and a wave of shouted insults crashed over him. Some protesters were out in the streets, demanding that their fellow Muslims show their pride and stand up to the invaders. ‘We have to find Selim,’ shouted Amine. ‘Go downstairs!’ They barely even said goodbye to Mouilala, whose head was shaking as she placed a hand on her son’s forehead to bless him. Amine shouted at his wife: ‘Are you mad? Why on earth did you let him go out? Don’t you know there are protests every day at the moment?’

  They had to get out of the old town as quickly as possible. Those narrow streets were a trap and Amine was afraid that his family would be ambushed by protesters. Noises came closer, voices bouncing off the walls of the medina. They saw men running fast behind and ahead of them. They were surrounded by an ever-denser crowd and Amine, who was carrying his daughter in his arms, started sprinting towards the gate of the medina.

  They reached the car and dived inside. Aïcha started crying. She wanted her mother to hug her. She asked if her brother was going to die and Amine and Mathilde simultaneously yelled at her to shut up. The crowd of protesters had closed around them and Amine couldn’t reverse the car. Strangers’ faces pressed against the windscreen. One man’s chin left a smear of grease on the glass. Unknown eyes stared at this odd family, at this child who might be friend or enemy. One boy started shouting, his arm raised skyward, and the crowd was galvanised. The boy couldn’t have been more than fifteen; he had a soft, patchy beard and gentle eyes, but his voice was deep and filled with hate. Aïcha looked at him and she knew that his face would be engraved permanently on her memory. The boy frightened her, yet she thought him handsome in his flannel trousers and his jacket like an American airman’s. ‘Long live the king!’ he yelled, and the crowd chanted ‘Long live Mohammed Ben Youssef!’ so loudly that Aïcha had the impression that it was their voices that were making the car pitch from side to side. Some boys started banging on the roof with sticks, lending a beat to the almost melodic noise. They began smashing everything they could find – car windows, streetlamps – and the streets were soon paved with broken glass. The protesters walked on the shards in their cheap shoes, unaware of the blood oozing from their feet.

  ‘Lie down!’ Amine shouted, and Aïcha pressed her cheek against the floor of the car. Mathilde protected her face with her hands and started intoning: ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.’ She thought about the war, about that day when she’d thrown herself into a ditch to avoid being shot by a plane. She’d dug her fingernails into the earth, she’d stopped breathing for a few moments, and then she’d squeezed her thighs together, so strongly that she almost came. Right now she wished she could share that memory with Amine or simply press her lips against his, dissolve her fear in desire. Then suddenly the crowd dispersed, as if a grenade had exploded at its centre, propelling bodies in all directions. The car pitched and Mathilde saw the eyes of a woman tapping on the window with her fingernails. The woman pointed at little trembling Aïcha and, without knowing why, Mathilde trusted her. She opened the window and the woman tossed two large pieces of onion inside before running away. ‘Gas!’ Amine shouted. Within a few seconds the car was filled with a sharp, sour odour and they were all coughing.

  Amine started the engine and drove very slowly through the cloud of smoke. He came to the gates of a park and jumped out of the car, leaving the door open behind him. In the distance he could see his brother playing with his son, as if the riot that had occurred less than a hundred feet from them had actually happened in a different country. The Jardin des Sultanes was calm and peaceful. A man was sitting on a bench with a large rusty cage at his feet. Amine went over and saw a thin grey-furred monkey inside it, the animal’s feet covered in its own shit. He squatted down to get a better look at the monkey, which turned to face him and opened its mouth wide, showing its teeth. The animal whistled and spat, and Amine wasn’t sure if it was laughing or threatening him.

  Amine called his son, who came running into his arms. He didn’t want to talk to his brother – he had no time for explanations or reprimands – and he led Selim back to the car, leaving Omar alone in the middle of the grass.

  On the way back to the farm there was a police roadblock. Aïcha noticed a long spiked chain strung across the street and she imagined the noise that the tyres would make if they burst. One of the policemen signalled to Amine to stop the car. He slowly approached the vehicle and took off his sunglasses to examine the faces of the people inside. Aïcha stared at the policeman with a curiosity that made him uneasy. He seemed baffled by this family that was calmly looking back at him in silence. Mathilde wondered what story he was imagining for them. Did he think Amine was the chauffeur? Did he see Mathilde as the rich wife of a colonist who had sent this servant to accompany her? But the policeman seemed indifferent to the adults; instead he stared at the children. He observed Aïcha’s hands, which were wrapped around her brother’s chest, as if to protect him. Mathilde slowly lowered her window and smiled at the young man.

  ‘They’re going to declare a curfew. Go home. Go on!’ The policeman slapped the car’s bonnet and Amine set off.

  For the Bastille Day dance Corinne wore a red dress and braided leather pumps. In the garden, which was lit by coloured paper lanterns, she danced only with her husband, politely refusing the invitations of the other guests. She thought that, by doing this, she would be able to avoid making the other wives jealous, to be friends with them, but instead those women considered her contemptuous and vulgar. So our husbands aren’t good enough for her? they all thought. In such circumstances, Corinne was always careful. She distrusted alcohol and enthusiasm because she knew that these things made the mornings after painful. She dreaded the feeling of having degraded herself, having talked too much, having tried too hard to be liked. Before midnight someone came to fetch Dragan, who was leaning on the bar, having a drink. A woman was giving birth; it was her third child, he had to come quickly. Corinne refused to stay on without him. ‘If you’re not here I won’t dance.’ He took her home before going to the hospital.

  When she woke the next morning her husband still wasn’t back. She lay in the room with the shutters closed, listening to the whirr of the fan blades, her nightdress soaked with sweat. In the end she got out of bed and walked to the balcony. Outside in the street, where the heat was already brutal, she saw a man sweeping the pavement with a palm leaf. Across the road the neighbours’ children were sitting on the front steps of their house while their mother rushed from one room to another, closing the shutters and scolding the maids who had not yet finished packing the suitcases. The father – who was sitting in the car with the door open, smoking a cigarette – looked like he was already exhausted by this long journey. They were going back to France. Soon, Corinne knew, the new town would be deserted. A few days before this her piano teacher had told her that she was going to the Basque Country. ‘I can’t wait to escape this heat and this hate for a few weeks.’

  Corinne left the balcony. She had nowhere to go, she thought. No home to return to, no childhood house filled with memories. She shivered with disgust as she remembered the dark streets of Dunkirk, the neighbour women spying on her. She saw them again, standing outside their hovels, gripping the shawls that covered their shoulders, their dirty hair tied in ponytails.
They had been suspicious of Corinne, whose body, at fifteen, had suddenly ripened. Her little-girl shoulders had to hold up her enormous breasts, her fragile feet had to bear the weight of her spectacular hips. Her body was a lure, a trap in which she herself was imprisoned. At the table, her father no longer dared even look at her. Her mother just said things like: ‘Look how she’s dressed!’ Soldiers ogled her, women judged her. ‘A body like that would make a pervert of anyone!’ They imagined she was sex-crazed. A woman like that, they thought, is only built for pleasure. Men threw themselves at her; they undressed her the way children unwrap a present, rough and frantic. Then, dazzled, they contemplated her extraordinary breasts, which – freed from the constraints of a bra – spread out like a cloud of cream. They slavered over them, bit them, as if driven mad by the thought that this treat would go on forever, that they’d never reach the end of these glorious wonders.

  Corinne closed the shutters and spent the morning in darkness, lying on the bed, smoking cigarettes until the filter burned her lips. Like Dragan’s childhood, there was nothing left of hers but a pile of stones, buildings destroyed by bombs, bodies buried in empty cemeteries. The pair of them washed up here, and when she’d arrived in Meknes she’d thought that perhaps she’d be able to build a new life. She’d imagined that the sun, the fresh air, the tranquillity of life in this place would have a redeeming effect on her body and she would finally be able to give Dragan a child. But months passed, then years. In the house the only sound was the sad thrum of the fan, never a baby’s laughter.

  When her husband came home, just before lunch, she tortured him with a thousand cruel questions. ‘How much did it weigh?’ ‘Did it cry?’ ‘Tell me, darling, was it a beautiful baby?’ Dragan, with his drowned man’s eyes, answered her gently, holding his beloved’s body in his arms.

  He’d planned to go to the Belhaj farm that afternoon, and Corinne suggested she go with him. She liked young Mathilde, with her nervous, clumsy ways. She’d been moved by Mathilde’s account of her own life. Mathilde had said: ‘I have no choice but to be alone. In my position, how could we possibly have a social life? You can’t imagine what it’s like being married to a native, in a town like this.’ Corinne had almost replied that it wasn’t always easy being married to a Jew, an immigrant, a man without a country, or being a childless woman. But Mathilde was young and Corinne didn’t think she would understand.

  When Corinne arrived at the farm she found Mathilde lying under the willow with her children asleep beside her. She approached in silence, so as not to wake the little ones, and Mathilde gestured for her to sit on the sheet that was spread out over the grass. In the shade, amid the sweet sound of the children’s breathing, she observed the trees growing down below, with fruits of different colours on their branches.

  That summer, Corinne came to the hill almost every day. She liked to play with Selim, whose beauty fascinated her, and to softly bite his cheeks and thighs. Sometimes Mathilde would turn on the radio and leave the front door open. They could hear the music from the garden and Corinne and Mathilde would each hold a child’s hand and dance together. Several times Mathilde invited her to stay for dinner and at nightfall the men would join them to eat in the garden under a pergola that Amine had built, where wisteria was starting to grow.

  News from the city came to them distorted by rumour. Mathilde didn’t want to know about the outside world. It was like an ill wind, bringing noxious air. But when Corinne arrived one day looking haggard and carrying a newspaper, Mathilde didn’t have the courage to tell her not to speak. The news paper’s headline read: ‘Tragedy strikes Morocco’. Corinne whispered so that the children wouldn’t hear about the horrors that had taken place in Petitjean on 2 August. ‘They killed six Jews,’ she said, before giving the grisly details like a diligent student answering a teacher’s question. A father of eleven with his chest ripped open. Houses looted and burned. She described the savaged corpses brought to Meknes to be buried and she quoted the words of rabbis, spoken in all the synagogues. ‘God will not forget. Our deaths will be avenged.’

  V

  In September, Aïcha went back to school. And now her constant lateness could be blamed on all the sick people. Ever since Rabia’s accident, word of Mathilde’s gifts as a healer had spread throughout the surrounding area. It was said that she knew the names of medicines and how to administer them, that she was calm and generous. From that day on, peasants would come to the door of the Belhaj farm every morning. The first few times it was Amine who answered the door and asked suspiciously:

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Hello, Master. I’ve come to see Madame.’

  Every morning the line of patients grew longer. During harvest season many female labourers came to see Mathilde. Some had been bitten by ticks; others had inflamed veins or couldn’t nurse their babies because the milk in their breasts had dried up. Amine disapproved of these women queuing on his front steps. He hated the idea that they were entering his home, spying on his things and his actions and going back to the village to tell everyone what they’d seen in the master’s house. He warned his wife against the sorcery, slander and envy that lie dormant in the hearts of all men.

  Mathilde could clean wounds, anaesthetise ticks with ether and teach a woman to clean a baby’s bottle and change a nappy. She spoke to the peasant women with a certain severity. She didn’t laugh with them when they made dirty jokes to explain their latest pregnancy. She rolled her eyes when they told her, over and over again, the same old stories about genies, babies sleeping in their mothers’ bellies, or pregnant women whom no man had ever touched. She raged against the peasants’ fatalism, which left everything in the hands of God, and she couldn’t understand their limp resignation. She repeated at length her recommendations for better hygiene. ‘You’re filthy!’ she yelled. ‘Your wound’s getting infected. Learn to wash yourself properly.’ She even refused to see one woman who had come a long way because her bare feet were covered in dried shit and Mathilde suspected that she had nits. Every morning now the house echoed with the wails of neighbouring children. Often it was hunger that made them cry, since the women would wean their children too abruptly, whether because they had to return to the fields or because they were pregnant again. The babies would go from their mothers’ milk to bread soaked in tea and they would grow thinner with every passing day. Mathilde cradled these children with their sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks, and sometimes tears would well in her own eyes when she couldn’t console them.

  Soon Mathilde was overwhelmed, and she felt ridiculous trying to treat all these patients in her improvised clinic with nothing more than alcohol, antiseptic and clean towels. One day a woman arrived with a child in her arms. The little girl was wrapped in a dirty blanket and when Mathilde moved closer she immediately saw that the skin of her cheeks was black and peeling off like the skin of a grilled pepper. In the peasants’ houses the women cooked on the ground and sometimes their children would get scalded by hot tea or have their mouth or ear bitten by a rat.

  ‘We can’t just do nothing,’ Mathilde kept telling Amine, and in the end she decided to stock up on supplies for the clinic. ‘I won’t ask you for money,’ she promised him. ‘I’ll manage.’

  Amine raised his eyebrows and began to laugh.

  ‘Charity,’ he said, ‘is a duty for a Muslim.’

  ‘For a Christian too,’ said Mathilde.

  ‘Then we’re agreed. There’s nothing else to say.’

  ***

  Aïcha got into the habit of doing her homework in the clinic, with its smell of camphor and soap. She would look up from her books and see peasants holding rabbits by the ears – thank-you gifts for the healer. ‘I don’t want them to give me their food but I also don’t want to hurt their feelings by refusing it,’ Mathilde explained to her daughter. Aïcha smiled at children who coughed like old men, whose eyes were covered in flies. She was impressed by her mother, whose command of Berber was improving every day and who scolded Tamo
for crying at the sight of blood. Sometimes Mathilde would laugh and sit in the grass, her bare feet touching the women’s feet. She kissed the bony cheeks of an old woman, she gave sugar to a pleading boy. She asked the women to tell her old tales and they did, clicking their tongues against their toothless gums and covering their mouths with a hand whenever they laughed. They forgot that Mathilde was their mistress and a foreigner, and in Berber they shared with her their most intimate memories.

  ‘People in peacetime should not have to live like this,’ repeated Mathilde, who was revolted by poverty. She and her husband shared the same aspirations for the progress of mankind: less hunger, less pain. They were both passionate about modernity and had a wild hope that machines would provide better harvests, that new medicines would put an end to disease. Amine, however, often tried to discourage his wife’s new mission. He feared for her health and he worried that these strangers’ germs might spread to his family, endangering his children. One evening a woman arrived with a little boy who’d had a fever for several days. Mathilde told the woman to undress the child and let him sleep naked, covered in cool towels. The next day, at dawn, the woman came back. The child was burning hot and he’d had convulsions during the night. Mathilde ushered the woman into her car and put the child in the back seat next to Aïcha. ‘I’m going to take my daughter to school and then we’ll go to the hospital, okay?’