by Monia Mazigh
“Listen, you guys, it looks like things are getting out of hand online. I heard from a friend that a girl we know who writes a blog was arrested two days ago.”
Donia’s face went livid. I couldn’t tell which it was: the shock of the news or anger. Reem and Farah exchanged whispers as they glanced sidelong at two tall young men who had just walked into the café. The news caught Sami’s attention. His expression turned serious, his eyebrows raised; he wanted to ask a question. He opened his mouth, but remained silent. Words betrayed him. Only his glance followed. Donia asked Jamel in a low voice:
“This blogger, do you know who she is? Who told you the news? Don’t tell me its Tounsia two-twelve.”
Suddenly things turned serious. Jamel hesitated, then threw a quick glance in my direction. Donia appeared to understand his questioning look.
“Speak up already! We’re all friends here,” she ordered him, with emphasis on the “all” as she looked at me.
I sat there, motionless, barely understanding what they were talking about, but making an effort to get nearer to them, to take an interest in the discussion. Donia sensed I was ill at ease.
“Here, political dissidents are arrested and thrown in jail. It’s forbidden to talk about politics, there’s no freedom of speech. You draw a caricature of someone, and you take a big risk,” she explained, never taking her eyes off Jamel.
Her voice was wavering and she spoke softly so as not to attract attention. But no one was watching us; there was laughter all around. People had come to the café to have a good time, not to talk politics. Reem and Farah got up to go to the washroom, leaving Jamel and Sami around our table. I dared to ask, “What are they writing, these cyber-dissidents? What are they upset about?”
Jamel leaned over and whispered in my ear: “Poverty, sky-high prices, injustice, dictatorship and nepotism, no work for the young. The blogger they just arrested, she’s one of them.”
Jamel’s outburst startled me. I’d never given Tunisian politics a second thought. Why should I? True, I agreed to come here to improve my Arabic and to get to know Tunisian culture, but that was it. “Maybe a trip to Tunisia will help you get to know yourself better,” was how Mom put it. The way she described her country, it was heaven on earth, a place where living was easy, and where relationships were warm and vibrant. A place where everything was sunbeams and sweetness. Deep inside, I knew Mom was laying it on thick in an attempt to persuade me. I knew she was looking at her homeland through a romantic lens, not to mention a strong dose of nostalgia; she’d been away for so long. But if she were ever to come back, she wouldn’t know which way to turn. Still, I wanted to seize the opportunity — to believe Mom’s words and try to find answers to my questions about my roots, my life, my future. After weeks of saying no, after weeks of indecision, I made up my mind. I put off my university registration for a semester, packed my bags, and arrived in Tunis to stay with Mom’s best friends, Auntie Neila and Uncle Mounir.
What did I know about Tunisian politics, about dictatorship, injustice, oppression, or cyber-dissidents? Mom may have mentioned them, but I hadn’t been paying attention. She was always talking. Even the last few days, when she called or sent four or five text messages a day, I didn’t take her seriously. She was getting worked up for nothing. But what if she was right? What if something weird was going on in this country that looked as if it were fast asleep? Could Donia, her pals, and my mom be right?
Donia was jiggling her leg; she looked really worried. Jamel put his hand on her shoulder and said in a low voice, “Do me a favour and stop moving your leg like that, you’re making me nervous.”
Without looking at him she stopped. Sami smiled timidly; you could feel the tension growing. “Do you think this is it? That things will really change?” he finally blurted out.
Jamel and Donia looked at him. I watched in silence. Reem and Farah came back from the washroom, their hair nicely arranged and their makeup refreshed. Clearly they weren’t living on the same planet.
Donia was the first to respond: “I don’t have the remotest idea! If it turns out they’ve arrested Tounsia two-twelve, that means they’re panicking, going after the small fry. Everybody knows that what Tounsia two-twelve says on her blog is, it’s almost . . .” She paused for a moment as she searched for the missing word. Like magnets attracted by the opposite pole, we drew close to her, to hear her. Her voice was faint, barely audible. “Almost banal, that’s what I meant to say. Yes, that’s it — banal.”
Jamel took up where she’d left off: “But that’s what the regime hates most of all. They want everybody to believe that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
Sami smiled and blinked. “Yes, that’s it, a world of hypocrites.”
His comment, sharp and to the point, made us all smile at once. But it also broke the ice, and the tension that had been building for the last few minutes melted away. Donia peeked at her phone.
Then she slowly turned her head toward Jamel, pointing a threatening finger at him. “Hey you! Watch yourself. Call me whenever you like, but no funny stuff.”
Jamel said nothing, but his face was relaxed. He threw her a knowing glance. Sami got to his feet.
“Guys, I’ve got to go, my father made a scene the last time I got in late.”
It was all Reem and Farah could do to stifle a sly smile as they chattered in low voices while looking at Sami. We all stood up. Donia paid for her mint tea and for mine as well. I didn’t even have time to object. Sami had already left. Reem and Farah spotted another group of young people they seemed to recognize and excused themselves and went off to join them. Donia pretended not to have noticed the whole thing. Outside, the sun was about to set. I noticed a European-looking gentleman jogging along the embankment overlooking the lake. It was as if I were back in Ottawa, near the Byward Market. The cafés, the restaurants, the people going by on bikes, the outdoor shows. A vision flashed through my mind and then vanished like the sun whose last rays I saw reflected on the buildings and cars. Jamel was speaking to Donia in a low voice. I couldn’t understand everything, but I picked up the words “demonstration” and “revolt.”
Donia came over to me and exclaimed, “What a beautiful view! If you don’t mind, it’s time to go home. We can go bowling some other time.”
I nodded without paying her too much attention. I was thinking about Jamel and Donia’s words. I wanted to know more. Donia drove her own car. Everyone was silent on the trip home. Jamel was sitting in the back seat; I sat in the passenger seat. Tunis was preparing for night. The streetlamps were coming on and the white glare illuminated the gathering dusk. Battered old yellow buses were carrying people back home from work. Donia dropped Jamel off at a station. He waved to us before disappearing into the crowd. Le passage, read the sign above the station entrance.
“Does he live far from here?”
“He lives in Ettadamoun Township. He gets there by light rail,” Donia answered.
“That’s a funny name! Doesn’t it mean ‘solidarity’? I think I came across the word in my Arabic class. Why should there be a township called ‘solidarity’?”
“I don’t know. It’s a populous area, pretty poor actually. Maybe we need more solidarity with those people.” Then she added, “So, did you like my friends?” asking with her usual frankness, which I was coming to appreciate more and more.
“Yes! The whole evening was surprising and exciting. I learned a lot about Tunisia, about politics. It was nothing like my Arabic courses, where you die of boredom,” I answered, letting down my guard for the first time since I got to Tunisia.
Donia’s face lit up; she liked what I said.
“Well, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. I’m sure there’ll be more in the next few days.”
She was referring to things I knew nothing about. I didn’t want to put her on the spot, so I pretended not to understand
exactly what she meant. She turned on the radio and a song in Arabic came on. I’d never heard the rhythms before. “It’s my favourite,” she said with a wink and a grin. Surprised, I found myself moving to the beat and humming the chorus. Clearly, Donia had more surprises for me. When her car stopped in front of Aunt Neila’s place, the song had ended. Donia put her arms around me and gave me a gentle hug.
“My heart is never wrong. Something tells me we’re going to be good friends, I know it.”
I didn’t reply, but I did return her hug. Then she got back into her car and drove off. The sound of the motor disappeared in the night. I pushed open the heavy door to the building. OUT OF ERDOR was written in large, jagged letters on a piece of brown cardboard stuck to the elevator door. I smiled at the misspelling. But I wasn’t looking forward to climbing eight flights of stairs. With a grimace, I put my foot on the first step.
FIVE
Tunis, January 3, 1984
When I finally reached home, I was gasping for breath. My lungs felt as if they were about to burst. Air, I needed air. I felt like sitting down to get some relief. My legs were shaking like reeds in the wind. One more step and I would flop down on the ground like a corpse, never able to get up again. I’d taken the same path home from the lycée hundreds of times before with Neila, carefree, chatting about our courses, making fun of our instructors’ curious behaviour. But on that day, the same path seemed to have been the longest of my life. A passage of death. Down deserted streets I’d rushed. No bus, not one car or honking horn, no one strolling nonchalantly along the sidewalks. Shutters were closed tight. Carpets, which had been hung out on windowsills in the morning to air, had been brought in ahead of time. The freshly washed sheets and clothing that would normally be fluttering in the wind on rooftops or balconies had disappeared, pulled in by unseen hands. Farther off, at the base of the hills that rose up beyond our house, I could see black smoke rising into the sky, as if someone were cooking over an immense campfire. What had happened in these last few hours? I shoved open the wrought iron gate that led to our front door. Mother opened the door and pulled me inside, slamming it behind me. I faltered, almost fell to the floor, but she held me upright. There I stood, looking like an idiot.
“What’s going on?” I asked Mother, in a faint voice.
Mother’s round, pudgy face comforted me. Her sweet and harmonious features had the effect of calming syrup sliding into my mouth and soothing my parched throat. Slowly, I came back to my senses. My chest had stopped heaving; once again I was breathing normally.
“Bread riots! The people want bread!” Father called out from the living room, his ear glued to the radio.
“Bread riots? Where, when? There was a big demonstration at our lycée. Is that why the police were firing in the air?”
As she heard my words, mother’s composure collapsed. She grimaced, face ashen.
“I hope no one was hurt or killed,” she said, through pursed lips.
I shook my head.
“But I saw smoke rising, burning tires maybe. I don’t have the faintest idea.”
As she attempted to explain what was happening, Mother got ahold of herself. She handed me a glass of water.
“Najwa’s mother Hedia told me this morning that the poor people in the El Omran, Ibn Khaldun, and Ettadamoun Townships can’t afford bread, couscous, and pasta anymore. With the latest increases, the price of a baguette has doubled, people are going hungry. What an unjust policy! What a stupid government!”
I sat down at the kitchen table, an antiquated affair with wobbly legs that papa had never taken the trouble to fix. It was covered with checked oilcloth. Mother had closed the kitchen shutters. The light was fading, as was my heart. Deep down I knew it: my life wouldn’t be the same. I gulped down a couple of mouthfuls of water. Now the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fit together. I would never have believed that people would come out into the streets to express their anger. I’d only read about demonstrations in books. The previous summer I’d read Émile Zola’s Germinal. The miners’ strength of character captivated me, and I’d thought long and hard about the character of Étienne Lantier, the hero of the story, the leader of the strike, and his dreams of justice and equality. Things like that happened only in France, I thought.
Nobody talked about such conflicts in Tunisia — or not in our house, at least. On television we heard the directives of President Bourguiba, the Father of the Nation, the supreme combatant. If I happened to turn on the television when one of his directives was being broadcast, my first reaction was to switch it off. If I had nothing better to do, I would stay tuned, but I could never understand what he was talking about. It was a mishmash of historical anecdotes, of laughter and tears, of sniffling and moralizing. Everyone loathed the regime, but everyone pretended to like it in order to survive, to feed their children, and to be like everyone else. Father was like everybody else. He said nothing, listened to the news on the radio, watched television, muttered insults directed at God knows who, and life went on. At the lycée there were three groups: the children of the rich, of the poor, and of all the rest.
Neila and I belonged to the third group. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. The children of the rich came right up to the main entrance in chauffeur-driven cars. They wore name-brand clothing and enjoyed winter sports in the French or Swiss Alps. In summer they took up residence in Hammamet, on Cap Bon, where most of their families owned villas.
We could barely see the poor. It was as if they wanted to hide, as if their very presence was an irritant. It was hard to tell whether we couldn’t see them or they made themselves invisible, for fear of humiliation. They were from the shantytowns, the same places where Mounir and his family lived. Not too long before, Mother had mentioned that the government planned to demolish the shantytowns and build social housing, with running water, sewers, and electricity. Perhaps it was a way to make poverty easier to swallow. But I didn’t know whether the project had ever come through. Neila would have known; she would have told me.
Then there were the people like Neila and me. Our parents were civil servants. We lived alongside the rich, but we weren’t like them — by accident or happy coincidence. Father had always had difficulty making ends meet. Mother did not have a job, but she managed to balance the budget well enough to make our life comfortable, “like everyone else,” as she would say. She did the cooking, darned the holes in Father’s socks, and bought our clothing in second-hand shops.
“Don’t you dare say where you get your clothes,” she would repeat like a mantra, pulling down her lower right eyelid with her index finger to make sure I took her advice to heart. Whenever she bought me a skirt, a blouse, or a pair of trousers from the shops that sold second-hand clothing shipped from America, the watchword was always the same.
“What if somebody asks me where I bought them?” I replied naively.
Mother lost her temper. She didn’t like my stupid questions. She would throw me a dark glance that made my blood run cold.
“Tell them your uncle brought them from France!”
My lesson learned, I didn’t say another word.
One day, Neila asked me where I’d bought the pleated red-and-blue plaid skirt I was wearing.
“My uncle brought it for me from France,” I answered, lowering my eyes to avoid her gaze.
“Oh, me too! My uncle brought me this big brown sweater from France!”
Without saying as much, we each understood that we were obeying orders from our mothers, and that in reality we belonged to the “others” — that group of people neither rich nor poor. The ones caught between the two extremes, like hostages. We were part of that famous middle class that was getting poorer and poorer by the day, but that still insisted on balancing its budget, on saving face, and on living like everybody else.
Father came into the kitchen. For the first time, I noticed how frail and fragile he had
become. His thinning hair was plastered to his skull like a spider web. The wrinkles on his forehead had gotten deeper with age. His slightly slumped back seemed even more hunched than usual. I didn’t know whether it was due to the day’s events, or whether the shock I’d experienced had opened my eyes and made me see the world in a different light.
“Nadia, why are you so upset?” he asked me. “It’s nothing. It’ll all be over soon, you’ll see.”
He was lying and I knew it. He wanted to reassure me. Mother was pretending not to hear a thing; she was boiling water to cook macaroni for the evening meal.
Suddenly we heard a loud boom, an explosion very close to our house. Mother clapped her hand to her heart and lifted her eyes skyward.
“Oh my God! Whatever is happening?”
Shots rang out. Father went to open the kitchen door that led to the garden to find out what was going on. He was determined to calm us down.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” he repeated. “Must be rubber bullets.”
Mother’s look was anything but happy.
“Don’t open that door, do you want to kill us all or what?”
Father backed up, hurried out of the kitchen, and went back into the living room. I could hear the sound of the radio, but the words were cold and incomprehensible.
