The Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  They had to wait a long time in the native hospital before a red-haired doctor finally examined the child. When Mathilde returned to pick up Aïcha at the end of the day she was pale and her jaw was trembling. Aïcha thought that something had happened. ‘Did the little boy die?’ she asked. Mathilde held her daughter, she pinched her arms and her legs. She began to weep and her tears wet Aïcha’s face. ‘My sweet angel, how do you feel? Look at me, darling. Are you all right?’ That night Mathilde couldn’t sleep. For once, she prayed. She believed she was being punished for her vanity. She’d thought of herself as a healer when in truth she knew nothing. All she’d done was risk her child’s life and maybe tomorrow she would find Aïcha with a high fever and the doctor would tell her, as he had that morning: ‘It’s polio, madame. Take care, it’s highly contagious.’

  The clinic also caused some dissent among the men in the neighbourhood. The labourers went to Amine to complain that his wife was advising their wives not to do their conjugal duty, that she was putting strange ideas in their heads. This Christian woman, this foreigner, shouldn’t be meddling in such things, sowing the seeds of discord in other families. One day Roger Mariani came to the Belhaj farm. It was the first time their wealthy neighbour had crossed the road that separated the two properties. Usually Mathilde saw him on horseback, surveying his land with a hat brim shading his face. He went into the room where the women were sitting on the floor, their children in their arms. When they saw him, some of the women ran off without saying goodbye to Mathilde, who was conscientiously applying a tulle gras dressing to a burn. Hands behind his back, Mariani walked across the room and stood behind her. He was chewing a stalk of wheat and the sound of his tongue annoyed Mathilde, made it hard for her to concentrate. When she turned around to face him he smiled at her. ‘Continue, please.’ He sat on a chair and waited until Mathilde had finished treating the boy with the burn. She told the boy to stay in the shade and get some rest.

  When they were alone Mariani stood up again. He was slightly unnerved by Mathilde’s height and by the lack of fear in her green eyes. All his life women had been scared of him, jumping at the sound of his booming voice, trying to run away when he grabbed them by the waist or the hair, weeping softly when he took them by force in a barn or behind a bush. ‘Your love of the darkies is going to blow up in your face one day,’ he warned Mathilde. He casually grabbed a bottle of alcohol and banged the sharp end of a pair of scissors against the table. ‘What do you think’s going to happen? You think they’ll turn you into a saint? Build a temple for you? Those women,’ he hissed, gesturing at the women working in the fields outside, ‘they’re hardened to pain. The last thing they need is someone teaching them to feel sorry for themselves. You understand me?’

  ***

  But nothing could deter Mathilde. One Saturday in early September she went to see Dr Palosi at his third-floor office in an ugly building on Rue de Rennes. Four European women were sitting in the waiting room and one of them, who was pregnant, put her hand on her belly when she saw Mathilde, as if to protect her unborn baby. They waited a long time in the room’s stifling heat, its heavy silence. One of the women fell asleep, her face leaning on her right hand. Mathilde tried to read the novel she’d brought with her, but the air was so hot that she couldn’t think straight; her mind kept flitting from one idea to another, too distracted to dwell on anything for long.

  At last Dragan Palosi came out of his office and when Mathilde saw him she stood up and gave a sigh of relief. He looked handsome in his white coat, with his black hair slicked back. He was very different from the jovial man she’d first met and she thought she could detect a hint of sadness in his dark-ringed eyes. His face, like any good doctor’s, bore the marks of fatigue. Their patients’ pain is always visible in their features; their shoulders sag under the weight of all the secrets they’ve been told, and they walk and speak slowly because they are exhausted by their own powerlessness.

  The doctor went over to Mathilde and hesitated for a second before kissing her on both cheeks. He noticed her blush and, to ease her embarrassment, examined the cover of the book she was holding. ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich,’ he read quietly. He had a deep voice, a voice full of promises, and she sensed that his body and his heart were full of extraordinary stories. ‘You like Tolstoy?’

  Mathilde nodded and while he escorted her into his spacious office he told her an anecdote. ‘When I arrived in Morocco, in 1939, I moved to Rabat and stayed with a Russian friend who was fleeing the revolution. One evening he invited some people to dinner. We drank, we played cards, and one of the guests, whose name was Michel Lvovich, fell asleep on the living room sofa. He snored so loudly that we started laughing, and my host said: ‘And to think that he’s the son of the great Tolstoy!’

  Mathilde’s eyes widened and Dragan went on.

  ‘Not a word of a lie – it was the son of that great genius!’ he exclaimed, pointing Mathilde to a black leather chair. ‘He died at the end of the war. I never saw him again.’

  A silence fell and Dragan was gripped by the incongruity of the situation. Mathilde turned her face to the sea-green screen behind which patients undressed.

  ‘To be completely honest,’ she began, ‘I didn’t come for a consultation. I need your help.’

  Dragan perched his chin on his joined hands. How many times had he been through this situation? ‘A gynaecologist must be ready for anything,’ one of his professors at the university in Budapest had told him. For women prepared to submit to the most awful experiments in order to have a child. For women who have discovered, from shameful symptoms, that their husbands have cheated on them. And lastly, for women who have realised too late that their arms have grown fatter and there is a pain in their lower abdomen. ‘But you must have suffered terribly,’ he said to these women. ‘Why didn’t you come to me before?’

  Dragan looked at Mathilde’s beautiful face; her complexion was not made for these latitudes and her skin was covered in pink blotches. What did she expect from him? Was she going to ask for money? Had she come on her husband’s behalf?

  ‘Please go on.’

  Mathilde spoke increasingly quickly, and with a passion that took the gynaecologist by surprise. She spoke about Rabia, who had strange spots on her belly and thighs and who’d been vomiting. She mentioned Jmia, whose eighteen-month-old child could not stand up. She admitted that she felt out of her depth, that she had learned to recognise the symptoms of diphtheria, whooping cough and conjunctivitis, but had no idea how to treat them. Dragan looked at her, his eyes wide and his mouth open. Impressed by the seriousness with which she described each pathology, he picked up a notepad and a biro and started writing down what she said. Occasionally he would interrupt her to ask a question: ‘And these spots, are they oozing or are they dry?’ ‘Did you disinfect the wound?’ He was moved by this woman’s passion for medicine, by the desire she showed to understand the extraordinary machine of the human body.

  ‘I normally don’t give advice or medicine unless I’ve examined the patients myself. But those women would never let a man examine them, particularly not a foreign man.’ He told her how a very rich shopkeeper in Fez had once come to see him about his wife, who was bleeding profusely. A doorman in rags had led him into the man’s house and Dragan had been forced to question the patient through a thick curtain. The woman bled out and died the next morning.

  Dragan stood up and pulled two thick books from his shelf. ‘The anatomical plates are in Hungarian, I’m afraid. I’ll try to find you some in French, but in the meantime you can familiarise yourself with the mechanism.’ The other book concerned colonial medicine and it was illustrated with black-and-white photographs. On the way home Aïcha leafed through this book and she stopped at an image captioned: ‘Containing a typhus epidemic, Morocco, 1944’. Men in djellabas, all standing in a line, were surrounded by a cloud of black powder and the photographer had managed to capture the mixture of fear and wonder on their faces.

  Mathilde
parked the car outside the post office. She opened the car door and stretched out her legs, touching her feet to the pavement. She’d never known a September as hot as this one. She took a sheet of paper and a pen from her bag and tried to finish writing the letter she’d begun that morning. In the first paragraph she’d written that they shouldn’t believe everything they read in the newspapers. That of course what happened in Petitjean was terrible, but the situation was more complicated.

  ‘My dear Irène, have you left for your holidays? I imagine – though perhaps I am wrong – that you are in the Vosges, near one of those lakes we used to swim in when we were young. I can still taste the blueberry pie served by that tall lady with warts all over her face. The taste has never left my memory and I think about it whenever I’m sad, to console myself.’

  She put her shoes back on and climbed the stairs that led to the post office. A smiling woman greeted her at the counter. ‘Mulhouse, France,’ Mathilde explained. Next she headed to the main room, where the hundreds of post office boxes were located. Little brass doors, each one with a number on it, covered the high walls. She stopped next to box number 25: the same number as her year of birth, she’d said to Amine, who was always indifferent to this kind of remark. She took the little key out of her pocket and inserted it into the lock, but it didn’t turn. She took it out and put it in again but still nothing happened and the box wouldn’t open. Mathilde repeated the same actions with increasing impatience, and her annoyance was soon making people stare. Was this woman stealing letters sent to her husband by another woman? Or was she trying to take revenge on her lover by opening his post office box? An employee walked up to her slowly, like a zookeeper who had to return an animal to its cage. He was a very young man with red hair and a protruding jawline. Mathilde thought him ridiculous and ugly with his enormous feet and the pompous look on his face. He was still a child, she thought, and yet his expression was severe.

  ‘Is there a problem, madame? May I help you?’ She yanked out the key so quickly that she almost elbowed the young man in the eye. He was much shorter than her. ‘It won’t open,’ she said angrily.

  The employee took the key from Mathilde but he had to stand on tiptoe to reach the lock. His slowness exasperated her. Finally the key broke in the lock and she had to wait while he called his manager. She was going to be late for work; she’d promised Amine that she would make progress on the labourers’ payslips and her husband would be furious if she wasn’t home in time to serve him lunch. The employee reappeared, armed with a stepladder and a screwdriver, and with great solemnity he proceeded to unscrew the hinges of the box. In a disheartened tone he said that he’d never had to deal with ‘a situation like this’ before and Mathilde wanted to pull the stepladder from under his feet. At last the door gave way and the boy handed the key to Mathilde. ‘How do I know this was the right key? Because if it wasn’t, you’ll have to pay for the box to be repaired.’ Mathilde pushed him out of the way, grabbed the pile of letters and – without even saying goodbye – headed towards the exit.

  Just at the moment when the heat struck her, when she felt the sun’s burning touch on the top of her head, she discovered that her father was dead. A telegram, drily dictated by Irène, had been sent to her the previous day. She turned the paper over, reread the address on the envelope, stared at the letters of the telegram as if it must be some kind of joke. Was it possible that, at that very instant, thousands of miles from here, in her country turned golden by autumn, her father was being buried? While the red-haired boy was explaining the unfortunate episode with box 25 to his bosses, men were carrying Georges’s coffin into the Mulhouse cemetery. As she drove, agitated and incredulous, towards the farm, Mathilde wondered how long it would take the parasites in the earth to munch through her father’s huge paunch, to plug that giant’s nostrils, to envelop that corpse and devour it.

  ***

  When Amine found out about his father-in-law’s death, he said: ‘You know I really liked him’, and he wasn’t lying. He had felt an instant friendship for the open-hearted, joyful man who had welcomed him into his family without prejudice or condescension. Amine and Mathilde had married in the church of the Alsace village where Georges had been born. Nobody in Meknes knew about this and Amine had made his wife promise to keep it secret. ‘It’s a serious crime. They wouldn’t understand.’ Nobody had seen the photographs taken after the ceremony. The photographer had asked Mathilde to stand two steps down from her husband so that their heads were at the same height. ‘It’ll look a bit silly if you don’t,’ he’d explained. When it came to organising the party, Georges had given his daughter everything she wanted. Sometimes he would slip some cash into her hand, a secret they’d kept from Irène, who was easily upset by pointless spending. Georges had understood that it was necessary to have fun, to feel beautiful. He hadn’t judged his daughter for her frivolity.

  Never in his life had Amine seen men as drunk as they were that night. Georges didn’t walk, he swayed; he clung to women’s shoulders, danced to mask his inebriation. Around midnight he wrapped his son-in-law in a loving headlock. Georges didn’t know his own strength and Amine worried that he might be killed, that Georges might break his neck through an excess of affection. He dragged Amine to the back of the overheated hall, where a few couples were dancing under the garlands of paper lanterns. They sat at the bar and Georges ordered two beers, ignoring Amine’s frantic gestures of refusal. He already felt too drunk, and he’d had to run outside a few minutes before this to vomit behind the barn. Georges made him drink to see how well he could take his alcohol. He made him drink so he would talk. He made him drink because it was the only way he knew to deepen a friendship, to create a bond of trust. Like children who nick their wrists with a knife and seal an oath with blood, Georges wanted to drown his affection for his son-in-law in endless pints of beer. Amine kept retching and burping. He looked around for Mathilde, but she seemed to have disappeared. Georges grabbed him by the shoulders and drew him into a drunk conversation. In his strong Alsatian accent he slurred: ‘God knows I have nothing against Africans and nothing against your race’s beliefs. Actually, to be honest, I don’t know shit about Africa.’ The men around them, brain cells deadened by alcohol, wet mouths hanging open, sniggered at this. The name of that continent continued to echo inside their skulls, summoning daydreams of bare-breasted women, men in loincloths, endless rows of farms surrounded by tropical vegetation. They heard ‘Africa’ and imagined a place where they might be masters of the world if only they could survive the foul air and the epidemics. ‘Africa’ provoked a burst of images that said more about their fantasies than about the continent itself. ‘I don’t know how they treat women where you come from,’ said Georges, ‘but that kid of mine … she’s not easy, is she?’ He elbowed the old man slumped beside him, as if seeking a witness to Mathilde’s insolence. The man turned his glassy eyes to Amine and said nothing. ‘I was too lax with her,’ Georges went on, although his tongue seemed to have swelled inside his mouth because he was becoming harder and harder to understand. ‘The kid lost her mother – what can you do? I felt sorry for her, got too soft. I used to let her run along the banks of the Rhine and I’d get in trouble because she’d steal cherries or go skinny-dipping in the river.’ Georges didn’t notice Amine blush or the look of impatience on his face. ‘You see, I was never brave enough to give her a good hiding. Irène kept telling me to, but I couldn’t. But you shouldn’t let her ride roughshod over you. Mathilde needs to know who wears the trousers, eh, lad?’ Georges kept talking and in the end he forgot he was addressing his son-in-law. A crude, manly camaraderie developed between the two of them and he felt free to go on about women’s breasts and bottoms, those fleshy mounds that had consoled him in all his moments of disillusionment. He banged his fist on the table and in a bawdy voice suggested that they visit the local brothel. The other men laughed and then he remembered that it was Amine’s wedding night, that tonight it would be his daughter’s breasts and bottom tha
t consoled his son-in-law.

  Georges was a womaniser and a drunkard, an infidel and a wily old fox. But Amine loved that giant who, on his first nights as a soldier posted in the village, had sat quietly in the living room, smoking his pipe in an armchair. In silence, Georges had observed the budding romance between his daughter and this African and he’d remembered how, when she was a little girl, he’d taught her not to believe the nonsense she read in storybooks. ‘It’s not true that negroes eat naughty children, you know …’

  ***

  In the days that followed, Mathilde was inconsolable. Aïcha had never seen her mother like this before. She would start sobbing in the middle of a meal or fly into a rage at Irène, who hadn’t told her about their father’s state of health. ‘He was ill for months and I never knew. If she’d just told me, I could have taken care of him, I could have been there to say goodbye.’ Mouilala came to offer her condolences. ‘He is free now. You must move on, because you are still alive.’

  After a few days Amine lost patience and reproached his wife for neglecting the farm and her children. ‘Here people don’t mope about for days. We say farewell to the dead and we continue to live.’ One morning, while Aïcha was drinking her hot sweet milk, Mathilde declared: ‘I have to leave or I’ll go mad. I need to visit my father’s grave, and when I come back everything will be better.’

  A few days before his wife’s departure – to which he’d agreed and for which he was paying – Amine spoke to her about the problem that was tormenting him. ‘I thought about it again when Georges died. Our wedding, at the church, has no legal value here. The country will soon be independent and if I die I don’t want you to find yourself with no rights over the children or the farm. When you get back, we need to deal with that.’

  Two weeks later, in mid-September 1954, Amine woke in a good mood and offered to accompany Aïcha on her walk through the fields. He told her: ‘For a peasant there’s no such thing as Sunday.’ He was surprised by his daughter’s resistance to this proposal, by the way she ran ahead of him, losing herself among the rows of almond trees. She seemed to know each tree and her little feet were astonishingly agile as they avoided nettle bushes and the muddy puddles formed by the rain that had finally fallen the previous night. Sometimes Aïcha would turn around, as if tired of waiting for him, and she’d stare at him with her round, surprised eyes. For a second, a minute, he was seized by a crazy idea, before changing his mind. A woman, he thought, can’t run a farm like this. He had other ambitions for Aïcha: he saw her as a city person, a civilised woman, perhaps even a doctor or a lawyer. They walked alongside a field and when the peasants saw the child they started to shout and wave their arms. They were afraid that the combine harvester would swallow her up – it had happened before and they couldn’t risk it with the master’s daughter. Her father went to see the labourers and they had a discussion that seemed, to Aïcha, to last forever. She lay down on the damp earth and saw a strange formation of birds in the cloudy sky. She wondered if they were messengers, coming from Alsace to announce her mother’s return.