The Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  Night was falling now and the servants lit candelabras in the patio. Amine noticed a beautiful wooden clock on a shelf; it was French-made and the gilt face shone in the gloom. Hadj Karim insisted on walking Amine to the gates of the medina, where his car was parked. Before leaving him Hadj Karim promised to ask around and to let him know as soon as he heard anything. ‘I have friends. Don’t worry, someone will talk.’

  On the way home Amine couldn’t stop thinking about what the lawyer had told him. It occurred to him that perhaps he lived too far from everything, that his isolation had made him guilty in some way, had blinded him. Like the coward that he was, he’d hidden away in the hope that nobody would find him. Amine had been born among these men, he belonged to this people, but he had never felt any pride in that fact. On the contrary, he’d often wanted to reassure the Europeans he met. He’d tried to convince them that he was different, that he wasn’t a liar or a superstitious fool or a lazy bastard, as the colon ists liked to describe their Moroccan workers. He lived his life in accordance with the image, engraved deep in his heart, that French people had of him. As a teenager he’d got into the habit of walking slowly, head lowered. He knew that his dark skin, his stocky physique, his broad shoulders made him suspicious in the eyes of white people, so he shoved his hands into his armpits like a man who has sworn not to fight. Now it seemed to him that he lived in a world populated entirely by enemies.

  He envied his brother’s fanaticism, his ability to belong. He wished that he didn’t believe in moderation, didn’t fear death. In moments of danger he always thought of his wife and his mother and he felt obliged to survive. In Germany, in the POW camp, his fellow prisoners had offered to let him in on their escape plans. They’d studied the options open to them in great detail. They’d stolen scissors to cut the barbed wire; they’d gathered a few provisions. For weeks Amine kept finding excuses not to put the plan into action. ‘It’s too dark,’ he told them. ‘Let’s wait for a full moon.’ ‘It’s too cold, we’ll never survive in those freezing forests. Let’s wait until the weather improves.’ The men trusted him, or perhaps they heard, in these cautious words, the echo of their own fears. Two seasons passed, two seasons of delays and a guilty conscience, two seasons spent pretending to be eager to escape. Of course, he was obsessed by the idea of freedom – it infiltrated all his dreams – but he couldn’t resolve himself to the possibility of being shot in the back, of getting snagged on barbed wire and dying like a dog.

  For Selma, Omar’s disappearance marked the beginning of a time of happiness and freedom. Now there was nobody watching her, worrying about her absences, her lies. All through adolescence she’d taken a sort of mean pride in her bruised calves, her swollen cheeks, her black eyes. To her friends, who refused to follow her in her wild excursions, she always said: ‘Why not enjoy life? You’ll get beaten anyway.’ To go to the cinema she wrapped herself in a haik, out of fear that someone would recognise her, and once inside the darkened room she let men caress her bare legs and told herself: This is so much happiness that they can’t take away from me. Omar would often be waiting for her on the patio and, watched by Mouilala, he would beat her until she bled. One evening, when she was still only fourteen, Selma had come home late from school and, when she’d knocked at the door of the house in Berrima, Omar had refused to open it. It was winter, so night had fallen early. She’d sworn that she’d been kept behind for private study, that she’d done nothing wrong. She’d invoked Allah and His mercy. Behind the hobnailed door she’d heard Yasmine begging Omar to forgive his sister. But Omar had held firm and Selma had spent the night in the garden next door, shivering with cold and fear as she lay in the wet grass.

  She hated that brother of hers, who wouldn’t let her do anything, who called her a whore and had on several occasions spat in her face. A thousand times she had wished him dead and cursed Allah for making her live under the reign of such a brutal man. He laughed at his sister’s desires for freedom. ‘My friends, my friends,’ he mimicked her in a bitter voice whenever she asked permission to visit another girl. ‘All you care about is having fun!’ Then he would pick her up by the collar, press his face against hers, savour the fear in her eyes, the trembling of her limbs, and smash her head against a wall or throw her down the stairs.

  With Omar gone and Amine too busy on the farm to visit very often, Selma was free. She lived like a tightrope walker, aware that her liberty would not last long and that soon, like most girls her age in Berrima, she wouldn’t even be able to go up on the roof terrace any more, because of her swollen belly and her jealous husband. At the hammam the other women would stare at her body and some would caress her hips. Once, the masseuse put her hand between Selma’s thighs with a certain brutality and said: ‘He’ll be a lucky guy, your husband.’ The touch of that oily hand, those black fingers strong from kneading other bodies, was overpowering. Selma realised that there was something unquenched inside her, something insatiable, a chasm waiting to be filled, and alone in her bedroom she did to herself what that woman had done to her, feeling no shame but no satisfaction either. Men came to ask for her hand in marriage. They sat in the living room while she crouched on the stairs, anxiously watching those middle-aged, pot-bellied suitors slurp their tea and pretend to hawk up phlegm to scare off the prowling cats. Mouilala let each one in excitedly, and listened to his questions, and when she realised that he had not come about her son, that he knew nothing of what had happened to Omar, she stood up and left, and the man would remain where he was for a few minutes, in a daze, before leaving this madhouse without a backward glance. Selma thought that they’d forgotten her then, that nobody in this family remembered her existence, and she was happy.

  She started playing truant, hanging around in the streets. She threw away her schoolbooks, she shortened her skirts, and – with the help of a Spanish friend – she plucked her eyebrows and had her hair cut in the latest fashion. From the drawers of her mother’s bedside table she stole enough money to buy cigar ettes and bottles of Coca-Cola. And when Yasmine threatened to tell on her she took the old slave in her arms and said: ‘Oh no, Yasmine, you won’t do that.’ Yasmine, who had lived her whole life in other people’s homes, under other people’s command, now took control of the household. Hanging from her belt was a heavy bunch of keys and the jangling it made could be heard in the corridor and out on the patio. She was in charge of the stores of flour and lentils that Mouilala, traumatised by years of war and scarcity, continued to build up. She alone could open the locks on all the doors, the cedar chests decorated with palmettes and the large cupboards where Mouilala’s trousseau had been left to gather mould. At night, when Selma disappeared while her mother slept, the old servant sat on the patio and waited for her. In the darkness all that could be seen of her was the incandescent end of the filterless cigarettes she smoked, dimly and flickeringly illuminating her black-skinned, battered old face. In a vague way she understood the young woman’s desire for freedom. Selma’s escapes awoke ancient, long-extinguished desires in the former slave’s heart.

  ***

  In the cold months of early 1955, Selma spent her mornings at the cinema and her afternoons at her friends’ houses or in the back of a café where the owner demanded that all drinks be paid for in advance. There the girls talked about love and travel, beautiful cars and the best way to escape their parents’ prying eyes. Their parents were at the centre of all their conversations. Those old people who understood nothing, who couldn’t see that the world had changed, who scolded the young for their obsession with dancing and sunbathing. As for the boys, they played table football and – intoxicated by their idle days – loudly proclaimed that they didn’t care what their parents said. They were sick of hearing about Verdun and Monte Cassino, about Senegalese Tirailleurs and Spanish soldiers. They were sick of their parents’ memories of famine, dead babies, land lost in battles. All these boys cared about was rock ’n’ roll, American films, beautiful cars and dates with girls who weren’t afraid to snea
k out at night. Selma was their favourite. Not because she was the most beautiful or the most brazen, but because she made them laugh and she had a lust for life so intense that it seemed nothing could hold her back. She was irresistible when she imitated Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, shaking her head and saying, ‘Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war!’ in a girly, high-pitched voice. Other times she would make fun of Amine, and all her friends would be bent double with laughter as she stood there frowning and puffing out her chest like an old soldier proud of his medals. ‘Think yourself lucky that you’ve never gone hungry!’ she said in a deep voice, pointing her finger accusingly. ‘You’re just a silly little girl who’s never been through a war.’ Selma wasn’t afraid. It never crossed her mind that someone might recognise her, denounce her. Or even that she was doing anything wrong. She believed in her lucky star and she dreamed of finding love. Every day, to her fear and excitement, the world seemed a little vaster, the possibilities open to her ever more infinite. Meknes grew so small, like a dress she’d outworn, a dress so tight that she found it hard to breathe, a dress that might rip open at the slightest movement. Sometimes that smallness made her angry and she would run screaming from a friend’s room or smash glasses full of hot tea from a café tabletop. ‘You’re going round in circles, can’t you see?’ she would yell at them. ‘Always the same conversations. Always!’ Her friends seemed so ordinary then, and she guessed that, behind their rebellious adolescent poses, they were really just obedient conformists. Some of the girls started to avoid her company. They didn’t want to risk their reputations by being seen with her.

  In the afternoons Selma would sometimes take refuge with her neighbour, Mademoiselle Fabre. This Frenchwoman had lived in the medina since the late 1920s, in a dilapidated old riad. The place was a mess: the living room filled with dirty benches, open chests, books stained with tea or food. The hangings had been nibbled by mice and the air smelled of unwashed cunt and rotten eggs. All the medina’s undesirables gathered in Mademoiselle Fabre’s riad, and Selma would often see orphans and poor young widows sleeping there, on the ground or in a corner of the living room. In winter the roof leaked, and the sound of the raindrops crashing against iron cisterns was ming led with the cries of children, the creaking of cartwheels out in the street, the clatter of weaving machines upstairs. Mademoiselle Fabre was an ugly woman. Her nose, with its dilated pores, was large and misshapen, her eyebrows were grey and sparse, and in the past few years she’d developed a tremble in her jaw that made it difficult to understand what she was saying. Under the baggy gandouras that she wore, Selma could see her paunchy belly and her thick legs covered in varicose veins. Around her neck she wore an ivory cross that she would stroke constantly like a charm or an amulet. She’d brought it from Central Africa, where she’d grown up, although she didn’t like to talk about that. Nobody knew anything about her childhood or about the years that had preceded her arrival in Morocco. The people in the medina said that she used to be a nun, that she was the daughter of a rich industrialist, that she’d been dragged here by a man she was madly in love with and then abandoned.

  Mademoiselle Fabre had lived among the Moroccans for more than thirty years, speaking their language, learning their customs. She was invited to weddings and religious ceremonies and had gradually become indistinguishable from the native women, drinking her hot tea in silence, blessing children and calling for God’s mercy on a house. When women gathered she was let in on their secrets. She gave advice, wrote letters for those who couldn’t read, worried about shameful diseases and the marks of beatings. One day a woman told her: ‘If the pigeon had kept silent, the wolf wouldn’t have eaten it.’ Mademoiselle was always extremely discreet. She refused to rock the foundations of this world where she was only a foreigner, but that didn’t stop her raging at the poverty and injustice she found here. Once, and only once, she had dared knock at the door of a man whose daughter showed exceptional gifts. She’d begged the girl’s strict father to support his child in her studies and offered to send her to a university in France. The man had not got angry. He hadn’t thrown her out of the house or accused her of spreading debauchery and disorder. He had just laughed. The old man had roared with hilarity and raised his arms in the air. ‘University!’ After wiping his eyes, he’d accompanied Mademoiselle Fabre to the door, almost tenderly, and thanked her.

  Everyone forgave Mademoiselle Fabre her eccentricity because she was old and unattractive. Because they knew her to be good-hearted and generous. During the war she’d fed poor families and given clothes to children in rags. She’d chosen her camp and never lost an opportunity to show it. In September 1954 a Parisian journalist had come to write a feature on Meknes. He’d been advised to meet this Frenchwoman who’d organised a weaving workshop in her house and who was so helpful towards the town’s poor. The young man went there one afternoon and almost fainted in that hot, airless house. On the floor children were sorting bits of wool into different colours and then putting them in straw baskets. Upstairs young women were sitting in front of large vertical looms, weaving and chatting. In the kitchen two old black women were dunking their bread in chestnut puree. The reporter asked for a glass of water and Mademoiselle Fabre tapped his forehead and said: ‘Poor boy. Don’t get worked up. Don’t try to fight it.’ They spoke about her good works, about life in the medina, about the moral and hygienic conditions of the young women who worked there. Then the journalist asked her if she was afraid of terrorists, if – like the rest of the French community – she was nervous about her safety. Mademoiselle Fabre looked up at the white, late-summer sky above her and balled her fists, as if to compose herself. ‘It’s not so long ago that we called people terrorists in France when they were resisting the Germans. Then they became Resistance heroes. After more than forty years of the protectorate, how can anyone expect the Moroccans not to demand freedom? They helped us fight for it, and we gave them a taste for it and taught them the value of it. They deserve it.’ The journalist, who was pouring with sweat, responded that independence would eventually be granted, but that it should be a gradual process, and that it was wrong to attack those French people who’d sacrificed their lives for this country. What would become of Morocco once the French had left? Who would run the country? Who would work the earth? Mademoiselle Fabre cut him short. ‘I don’t care what the French think, to be perfectly honest. They seem to think that they’re the ones who’ve been invaded by the Moroccans, who are growing and asserting themselves. The French need to understand the reality here: they’re the foreigners.’ And she told the journalist to leave, without offering to accompany him to his hotel in the new town.

  Every Thursday afternoon a group of girls from good families would go to see the Frenchwoman. Their parents thought she was teaching them to knit, cross-stitch and play the piano. They trusted her because they knew Mademoiselle Fabre would never dare try to convert their children. And it was true that she never mentioned Jesus or His love spreading all over the world, but all the same she did convert them. None of those girls learned to play more than two notes or darn a sock, but they would spend hours on the patio or in the Moroccan parlour, lying on mattresses and stuffing themselves with honey cakes. The old lady would play a record and teach them to dance, she would read out poems that would make them blush, and some of the girls would even run away, crying, ‘Ouili, ouili, oh là là!’ She lent them copies of Paris Match and afterwards torn-out pages would be seen flying on the wind from terrace to terrace and portraits of Princess Margaret would be found lying in the gutter.

  One afternoon in March 1955, while she was carrying over a tray of tea for her students, Mademoiselle Fabre overheard them deep in conversation. For the past week the students at the local secondary school had been on strike because one of the teachers had humiliated a young female student. He’d accused her of writing a subversive composition on Joan of Arc’s battle against the English and of using it to demonstrate her nationalist sympathies. From upstairs they could hear the worker
s laugh as they repaired the roof and the girls craned their necks, trying to catch a glimpse of them. Mademoiselle Fabre ceremoniously poured mint tea into chipped glasses, then she whispered to Selma: ‘Come with me, mademoiselle. I need to speak with you.’

  Selma followed her into the kitchen. She wondered what this could be about. She almost said that she didn’t care about politics, that her sister-in-law was French, that she didn’t want to take sides, but Mademoiselle Fabre just smiled at her and invited her to sit at a little wooden table where a basket of fruit sat, midges hovering. For a few minutes, which seemed interminable to Selma, the old woman stared out at the bougainvillea that stretched out over the back wall of the garden. She picked up a wormy peach. Beneath the skin its flesh was black and soft.

  ‘I heard today that you’re not going to school any more.’

  Selma shrugged. ‘What’s the point? I didn’t understand any of it.’

  ‘You’re an idiot. Without education you’ll never make anything of your life.’

  Selma was surprised. She’d never heard Mademoiselle Fabre sound this strict before.

  ‘This is about a boy, isn’t it?’

  Selma blushed. She wished she could just run out of that house and never return. Her legs started to shake and the old woman put a hand on her knee.

  ‘You think I don’t understand? You probably imagine I’ve never been in love …’