Mathilde looked so happy to see Dragan that he felt his heart contract even more. She wanted to lead him into the clinic, show him the progress she’d made in arranging her instruments and medicines. She asked about Corinne, who was staying in their cabin by the sea, and whom he missed. She said he should eat lunch with them and, as he noticed that her neck and cheeks were covered with red blotches, she apologised that all they were going to eat was coffee and toast. ‘It’s silly, but the children like it.’ Dragan, afraid of being overheard, whispered that he’d come about something serious and that perhaps they should talk about it in the office.
He sat facing Amine and Mathilde and, in a neutral voice, told them about last night’s events. Amine shifted in his chair and stared through the window, as if he had more urgent business elsewhere. His expression seemed to say: ‘What does this have to do with me?’ When Dragan spoke Omar’s name the couple froze, suddenly attentive and united. Not once did they look at each other, but Dragan could see that they were holding hands. At that moment they were not in opposing camps. They weren’t rejoicing in the other’s misfortune. They weren’t waiting for the other to cry or punch the air so that they could angrily insult them. No, at that moment they both belonged to a camp that didn’t exist, a strange camp where forgiveness for violence and compassion for both the killers and the killed was mixed in equal measure. All the feelings that rose inside them seemed like a form of treachery, and so they preferred to stay silent. They were at once victims and murderers, companions and enemies, two hybrid beings incapable of giving a name to their loyalties. They were excommunicated; two worshippers who could no longer pray in any church and whose god was a secret god, a private god whose name they didn’t even know.
IX
Eid al-Adha fell on 30 July that year. In the town, as in the village, people feared that the festival celebrating Abraham’s sacrifice would turn into a massacre. The Resident-General gave very strict instructions to the soldiers stationed in Meknes and to the bureaucrats, who were angry that they wouldn’t be able to return to France for the summer. Many of the colonists near the Belhaj farm were leaving their properties. Roger Mariani was going to Cabo Negro, where he owned a house.
One week before the festival Amine bought a ram. He tied the animal to the weeping willow and Mourad fed it straw. From the tall window in the living room Aïcha and her brother watched the ram, with its yellowish hair, its sad eyes, its menacing horns. Selim wanted to go outside and stroke the animal, but his sister wouldn’t let him. ‘Papa bought it for us,’ he kept repeating, and Aïcha felt a sudden urge to be cruel. In gory detail she described exactly what would happen to the ram. The children weren’t allowed to watch when the butcher came to slit the animal’s throat and the blood gushed out then spread through the grass of the garden. Tamo fetched a bowl and cleaned the red grass while thanking God for His generosity.
As the women ululated, one of the labourers butchered the animal on the ground. Its skin was hung on the front gate. Tamo and her sisters made large fires in the backyard where the meat would be grilled. Through the kitchen window the children watched as embers flew and listened as hands were plunged into the animal’s entrails, making a sound like sponges soaked with mucus, a slimy, sucking sound.
Mathilde put the heart, lungs and liver into a large iron vat. She summoned Aïcha and pushed the child’s face towards the purplish heart. ‘Look, it’s exactly like it is in the book. The blood goes through there.’ She stuck her finger in the aorta then pointed out the two ventricles and the atrium, concluding with the words: ‘And I’ve forgotten what that one’s called.’ Next she picked up the lungs as the maids stared in horror at this sacrilegious behaviour. Mathilde placed the two grey, viscous bags under the tap and watched them fill with water. Selim clapped his hands and she kissed him on the forehead. ‘Imagine it’s air instead of water. You see, my love, that’s how we breathe.’
Three days after the festival, men from the liberation army turned up in the douar in the middle of the night, faces hidden under black balaclavas. They ordered Ito and Ba Miloud to feed them and find them some petrol. And they left the next morning, promising that victory was close and that the years of depredation were behind them.
***
At the time, Mathilde thought her children were too young to understand what was happening. She didn’t explain the situation to them, but that was not out of indifference or a determination to keep them in the dark. She believed that children lived in a bubble of innocence that no adult could pierce, no matter what was going on. Mathilde thought she understood her daughter better than anyone; she believed she could read her soul as easily as she could look at a beautiful landscape through a window. She treated Aïcha like a friend, an accomplice, telling her secrets that she was too young to know, then reassuring herself with the thought: What she doesn’t understand can’t hurt her.
And she was right: Aïcha didn’t understand. To her the adult world appeared hazy, indistinct, like the countryside at dawn or in the evening twilight, those hours when the shapes of things faded and blurred. Her parents talked in front of her and she caught snatches of those conversations when they lowered their voices and used words like murder and disappearance. Aïcha would sometimes ask herself silent questions. She wondered why Selma didn’t sleep with her any more. Why the female workers let themselves be dragged into the tall grass by the men, with their cracked hands and sun-reddened necks. She suspected that there was something called misfortune and that men were capable of cruelty. And she sought explanations in the nature that surrounded her.
That summer she returned to her life as a little savage, a life with no timetable or constraints. She explored the world of the hill, which was, for her, like an island in the middle of the plain. Sometimes there were other children, boys of her age carrying dirty, frightened lambs. They walked through the fields bare-chested, and their skin was browned by the sun, the hair on their forearms and the backs of their necks turned blonde. Trickles of sweat ran down their dusty chests. Aïcha felt something stir inside her when these young shepherds came towards her and offered to let her stroke the animals. She couldn’t stop staring at their muscular shoulders, their thick ankles, and she saw in each of them the man he would become. For now, they were children like her, and they floated in a state of grace, but Aïcha understood – without being entirely aware of it – that adult life was already changing them. That work and poverty made their bodies age more quickly than hers.
Every day she followed the procession of labourers as they walked under the trees, imitating their movements while trying hard not to disturb their work. She helped them build a scarecrow with some of Amine’s old clothes and fresh straw. She hung shards of broken mirrors in the branches of trees to scare away birds. For hours she would watch the owl’s nest in the avocado tree or a molehill at the bottom of the garden. She was patient and silent and she learned to catch chameleons and lizards, which she hid in a box, occasionally lifting the lid for a moment to observe her prey. On a path one morning she found a tiny bird embryo, no bigger than her little finger. The creature, which wasn’t even quite a creature, had a beak and claws, a skeleton so small that it was almost unreal. Aïcha lay with her cheek against the earth and watched ants running over the corpse. Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they’re not cruel, she thought. She wished she could question the earth, ask it about all the things it had seen, the other people who’d lived here before her, those who were dead and whom she’d never known.
Precisely because she felt free, Aïcha wanted to find the limits of the domain. She’d never really known where she was allowed to go, where her family’s property ended and the others’ land began. Each day her energy took her a little further and she kept expecting to find a wall, a fence, a cliff, something that would tell her: ‘This is where you must stop. You cannot go any further.’ One afternoon she walked past the hangar where the tractor was parked. She crossed through fields of quince and olive trees, she beat
a way through the tall stems of the sunflowers burned by the summer heat. She found herself in a small enclosure where nettles and other weeds grew waist-high and here, at last, she saw a whitewashed wall, about three feet high. She had been here before, a long time ago: as a little girl she’d held Mat hilde’s hand as her mother picked flowers and waved away midges. Then her mother had shown her the wall and said: ‘That’s where your father and I will be buried.’ Aïcha walked through the enclosure. The scent of honey seeped from cactuses covered in prickly pears and she lay on the ground in the place where she imagined her mother’s body would be buried. Was it possible that one day Mathilde would be very old, as old and wrinkled as Mouilala? Aïcha put her elbow over her eyes to shield her face from the sun and dreamed of the anatomical plates that Dragan had given them. She knew by heart the names of certain bones in Hungarian: combcsont for the femur, gerinc for the spine, kulcscsont for the clavicle.
***
During dinner one evening Amine announced that they were going to spend two days by the sea, on the beach at Mehdia. There was nothing surprising about that particular destination; it was the closest beach to Meknes, only a three-hour drive away. But Amine had always mocked Mathilde for the leisure activities she craved: picnics, forest walks, mountain hikes. People who liked having fun, he said, were lazy, good-for-nothing shirkers. That he’d organised this outing was perhaps due to Dragan, who kept urging him to stay at their cabin, and who – always close to Mathilde – saw flashes of envy in the young woman’s eyes whenever he mentioned his holidays. There was no malice in that envy, only sadness; it was more like the envy of a child who sees another child cuddling a toy that she knows, with simple resignation, she will never possess. Or perhaps Amine had been driven to it by deeper feelings, a desire to be forgiven by his wife – whom he could see slowly fading here on this hill, in this world of endless work – and to bring some happiness into her life.
They left in the car at dawn. The sky was pink, and at that hour the flowers that Mathilde had planted near the entrance of the property were especially fragrant. Amine had been in a hurry to leave: he wanted to make the drive while it was still cool outside. Selma was staying at the farm. She didn’t get up to wish them goodbye and Mathilde thought it was better that way. She wouldn’t have been able to meet the girl’s eye. Selim and Aïcha sat in the back seat. Mathilde wore her raffia hat. In a large basket she’d packed two small spades and an old bucket.
A few miles from the sea, they encountered traffic jams. Selim had thrown up, and the car smelled of his vomit: sour milk and Coca-Cola. They got lost in streets filled with holidaying families and it took them a long time to find the Palosis’ cabin. On the terrace Corinne was sunbathing while Dragan, his face red and bathed in sweat, had drunk a bit too much beer. He was happy to see them and he carried Aïcha in his arms. He made her fly, and that memory – the memory of her lightness in those huge, hairy hands – would be almost as strong, almost as unbearable, as her memory of the sea. ‘What?’ said the doctor. ‘You’ve never seen the sea before? Well, we have to do something about that!’ He carried the little girl across the sand, but she wanted him to go more slowly. She wanted to stay on that sun-soaked terrace a little longer, eyes closed, listening to the strange, deafening sound of the sea. That was what she liked most to start with. That was what she found beautiful. That sound, like when someone rolls up a newspaper into the shape of a telescope and puts it to your ear and blows. That sound, like the breathing of someone who’s deeply asleep, enjoying sweet dreams. That backwash, that tender fury, distorted and amplified by the muffled laughter of playing children, the warnings of mothers – ‘Don’t get too close, you might drown!’ – the laments of beignet vendors as their feet burned on the hot sand. Dragan, still holding her in his arms, advanced towards the water. He put her down and Aïcha sat on the beach to take off her beige leather sandals. The sea touched her and not for an instant was she frightened. With her fingertips she tried to catch the foam that bubbled at the waves’ edges. ‘L’écume,’ said Dragan in his strong accent, pointing at the white froth. He seemed proud that he knew the word.
The grown-ups ate lunch on the terrace. ‘A fisherman came this morning to show us what he’d caught. You’ll never eat anything fresher than this in your life.’ The maid, who had come with them from Meknes, had prepared a salad of tomatoes and pickled carrots, and using their fingers they ate grilled sardines and a sort of white fish, long like an eel, with a firm, bland flesh. Mathilde kept fiddling with the children’s plates, reducing the fish to shreds. ‘Well, we don’t want them to choke on a bone, do we?’ she said. ‘It would ruin everything.’
As a child Mathilde had been a brilliant swimmer. Her classmates said she had the body for it. Broad shoulders, strong thighs, thick skin. She would go swimming in the Rhine even in autumn, even before the arrival of spring, and come out with violet lips and wrinkled fingers. She could hold her breath for a very long time and she liked nothing better than having her head underwater, being submerged in what was not a silence but a whistling of the depths, an absence of human agitation. Once, when she was fourteen or fifteen, she’d floated, her face half underwater like an old branch, for so long that one of her friends had dived in to rescue her. He’d thought she was dead, like those girls in romance stories who drown themselves in a river over a lost love. But Mathilde had raised her head and laughed: ‘Fooled you!’ The boy had got angry then. ‘Now my new trousers are wet! My mother’s going to kill me …’
Corinne put on a swimming costume and Mathilde followed her on to the beach. Further off, some families had set up large tents on the sand. They would camp there for a whole month, cooking on little terracotta canouns and washing in the public showers. Mathilde kept moving forward and when the water reached her chest she felt such happiness that she almost rushed over to Corinne and hugged her. She swam, as far as she could, diving down as deep as her lungs would permit. Occasionally she would turn around and see the little cabin getting smaller and smaller, more and more indistinct in that row of identical beach houses. Without knowing why she started waving her arms, perhaps just to greet her children, or to tell them: ‘Look how far I’ve come.’
Selim, wearing a straw hat that was too big for his head, was digging a hole in the sand. Some other children saw this and came over to look. ‘We’re going to make a castle,’ said one little girl. ‘Mustn’t forget the moat!’ said a boy with three missing teeth who spoke with a lisp. Aïcha sat with them. It was funny how easy it felt to make friends when you were on the beach! Half-naked, their skin browned by the sun, they had fun together and thought of nothing but making the hole as deep as possible, until they struck water and saw a little lake form below their castle. Aïcha’s hair had been uncrinkled by the sea air and she ran her hands through the pretty curls, thinking how she would have to ask Mathilde to pour salt into her bathwater when they got back to the farm.
Late that afternoon Corinne helped Mathilde wash the children. Wearing pyjamas, sweetly exhausted by hours of playing and swimming, they lay on the terrace. Aïcha felt her eyelids growing heavy, but the beauty of the view kept her awake. The sky turned red, then pink, and at last a ring of purple haloed the horizon while the sun, more incandescent than ever, was slowly swallowed up by the sea. A man came along the beach selling grilled corn, and Aïcha nibbled the cob that Dragan handed her. She wasn’t hungry but she didn’t feel like saying no to anything; she wanted to enjoy everything that this day had to offer. She bit into the corn and some grains got stuck between her teeth. This felt quite unpleasant and she started to cough. Before falling asleep she heard something she’d never heard before: her father’s laughter, open, spontaneous, and without a care in the world.
***
When Aïcha woke the next morning the grown-ups were still asleep. She walked on to the terrace alone. She’d had a dream as long as those apple peels that Mathilde would sometimes make, lips pursed in concentration, intent on turning the skin of the fruit into a
garland. The Palosis ate breakfast in their swimming costumes, which seemed to shock Amine. ‘We live like castaways when we’re here,’ said Dragan, whose milky skin had turned cherry-red. ‘We wear as little as possible and eat whatever the sea gives us.’
By noon it was so hot that a cloud of red, shiny dragonflies formed just above the water; the insects nosedived into the sea before gliding back up again. The sky was white, the light dazzling. Mathilde moved the parasol and the towels as close to the water as she dared, so they could enjoy the coolness of the breeze and keep an eye on the children, who never tired of splashing in the waves, digging their hands into the wet sand, watching tiny fish dart around their ankles. Amine sat down next to his wife. He took off his shirt and trousers; underneath he was wearing a pair of trunks that Dragan had lent him. The skin of his belly, back and calves was pale and there was a tan line on his bare arms. He didn’t think he’d ever offered his body to the caress of the sun like this before.
Amine couldn’t swim. Mouilala had always been afraid of the water and she’d forbidden her children to go near the wadi or even the well. ‘The water could swallow you up,’ she’d told them. But watching children plunge into the waves and small, thin, white women adjusting their swimming caps as they swam, necks straight and heads bobbing above the surface of the water, Amine thought it couldn’t be that complicated. Why shouldn’t he do the same thing? After all, he could run faster than most other men, ride bareback and climb a tree using only his hands.
The Country of Others Page 24
