by Monia Mazigh
“How’s your mother now?” I finally managed to ask Mohamed.
“She was still crying when I went out this morning. She couldn’t get out of bed. Hasna my sister is staying with her — she didn’t go to work at the factory.”
Without realizing it, we’d continued to walk. Now we were only a few yards from Mohamed’s elementary school. The pupils had congregated in front of the tall blue door waiting for it to open. Mohamed didn’t want to talk. He fell silent.
Neila asked him: “Where did they take him? Do you know?”
Mohamed shook his head. His eyes avoided ours. Then, abruptly, he said in a near-whisper: “Daddy said this morning that he would go to the El-Menzah 6 police station. Maybe he can find out more.”
Mohamed pulled one of his hands from his pocket and waved timidly to us. His school bag was still hanging from his back, as if all it carried was poverty. We continued on our way in silence. Neila was dabbing at her eyes with her hanky.
“What are we going to do?” I asked her, to break the silence.
“Nothing. I don’t have the faintest idea. Do you think he’ll get off?” she asked, eyes full of uncertainty.
“Sure, why not. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But can’t you see? It’s the police. The police! You think they’ll let him go, just like that?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “So, are the police God, or something?” I was getting upset. Neila was giving up hope too easily. Sinking into despair.
“Yes, almost God,” she shot back. “Mother told me the other day not to get involved with the police. She also told me to stay away from politics, it’s for rich people. They’re the only ones who can rule. People like us, we’re nothing but khobzistes, we eat our bread and that’s that.”
There had always been a gleam of pride in Neila’s eyes when she told me a story to show my ignorance. But this time, it wasn’t like before. Hearing about people’s gossip, their visceral fear of the regime, didn’t impress me anymore.
“He’ll get out, you’ll see. Come on, let’s get moving, otherwise we’ll be late. I’m sure Botti will be watching, and we won’t be able to climb over the wall.”
Neila followed me, but she was dragging her feet. I didn’t know what to say to her. She looked so miserable! She was suddenly another Neila, one who was ten years older. High-spirited, optimistic Neila, the girl who told me racy stories and taught me about sex, that Neila didn’t live in the body that was walking beside me. I wanted to shake her, to wrap my arms around her, comfort her, tell her that Mounir would be released soon, that he’d been arrested for a noble cause. That he was no criminal, but a political militant, a dreamer who wanted to change his country for the better. But my mouth refused to utter the words.
We finally reached the schoolyard of our lycée. Very little had changed. And yet, the day of the riots I thought that the whole lycée was about to collapse. Aside from a few broken windows covered by pieces of cardboard held in place with tape, nothing caught my eye. The grey doors to the toilets, the acrid smell, the long corridors that seemed to go on forever, the paint peeling from the walls, the monitors’ office dark like a tomb: everything was in order and in its place. The monitors were drawn up in front of the main entrance like rats, ready to attack, ears tuned and pointed noses sniffing the air. Botti, his potbelly overhanging the belt that made him look fatter still, was the ringleader. In one hand he held a whistle, and the other swung back and forth at his side. He looked even nastier than usual; his squinting eyes were two narrow slits. His cheeks were like two yellow potatoes separated by an almost invisible nose. Maybe he intended to get even with everyone who had joined in the rioting. Farther off, the students were milling around in the yard. The same old cliques, the same groups, the same laughter, the same exclamations. Nothing had changed. Our lives were returning to normal. But had they ever really stopped? We were back to where we began, just as we were before the price of bread went up. Neila and I wandered aimlessly around the schoolyard. Hand in hand, we strolled like ghosts among the living. We’d buried our fine memories and our indifference. Neila was prematurely grieving and me, well, I was boiling. Now I was questioning everything; I wanted no more of the futile and hypocritical life I’d been leading. Heart pounding, I could feel change rushing through my veins, blood circulating wildly.
In the classroom, our instructors’ faces seemed frozen in time. They didn’t say a word about the riots. They didn’t speak a word about that day when the shouts of the demonstrators invaded our schoolyard and drove us out, panic stricken, not knowing which way to turn, that day when the poor became kings for twenty-four hours. That day when the coherent little world I’d spent eighteen years building collapsed. They said nothing. Not a word. Not a comment. Not a wrinkled brow. Back to where we began, the Father of the Nation had decreed, and his well-behaved children obeyed. We sat down in our assigned seats, opened our notebooks and our textbooks to the same page where we’d closed them and thrown them hastily into our bags to flee the melee. Flee the troublemakers. I was happy that Neila was beside me, but every time I glanced at her, her eyes were far away. She had set out on a journey in search of a love lost too soon. Of happiness never consummated.
I couldn’t stand the half smiles and half grimaces of our instructors, their shrill voices when they told us how to behave or how stupid we were. I couldn’t stand Sonia’s mincing little routine, the way she constantly made eyes at the Arabic instructor who pretended not to notice anything but whose fingers were fiddling busily in his pants pockets not far from his fly. I didn’t want to breathe the stifling, resigned, and nauseating stink that emanated from the class. My lungs cried for justice. And I wanted it right away.
My thoughts went to Mounir. The blows that Mohamed described to us that morning were now engraved on my memory. And the insults he so hesitantly recited were recorded like they were on a cassette that was playing and replaying in my mind. Slap. No-good punk. Slap. No-good punk.
“Mademoiselle Mabrouk, read the poem on page twenty-three, second stanza . . .”
Was someone speaking to me? I thought I heard my name. The instructor’s words came to me as though in a nightmare, distant, muffled in cotton wool. I couldn’t understand what he wanted me to do. Neila pointed to the specific paragraph in my open book. Then she gave me a light kick under the desk. At last I got it. The instructor was growing impatient; he opened his mouth to start making fun of me, but I cut him short and began reading in a loud voice:
Against my will, in this world below I emerged,
And my voyage is toward another world.
That too against my will, as God is my witness!
Am I predestined, between these two worlds,
Some task to achieve,
Or am I free my own way to choose?
I read the stanza straight through and a bit breathlessly. The verses of al-Maari, a tenth-century Arab poet — pessimistic, ironic, and critical of human failings — flowed painfully from my mouth. Better they had been left to rest in peace, and not mingle with the fetid air of the classroom.
The instructor, one hand in his pocket and the other holding the book, looked me over deliberately, then said: “What did Abu al-Ala’a al-Maari mean by these words? Can you please remind us of the themes we discussed in class last week?”
Three days ago I would simply have regurgitated the same banalities that we’d jotted in our notebooks. But on this day, I did not want to play the same old game. I held my peace. I did not answer. I was on strike. Neila’s little kicks were getting harder. I ignored them. I heard someone whispering the words: “pessimism,” “anger,” “bitterness.” I ignored them as well and stared straight ahead. Monsieur Kamel did not frighten me. I wore my insolence on my sleeve.
“Mademoiselle Mabrouk, not only do you not pay attention in class, but you do not even take the trouble to review your notes before coming to class, and yo
u still expect to write your final exams in a few months’ time? If this is not the height of negligence and laziness . . .” He paused for an instant as if searching for even sharper words, and then cleared his throat and declared: “If this happens again, you will gather up your things and leave this classroom. I don’t need any more dunces in my class. I’ve had it up to here!”
His face turned crimson. Fine drops of saliva sprayed from his mouth and onto Sonia’s desk as she was rummaging through her school bag, pretending to look for something. She didn’t even notice. Her aim was to pass with high marks. Monsieur Kamel would help her. Maybe he would even slip her the exam questions? Sonia could buy everything — why not an exam from Monsieur Kamel?
I did not lower my eyes, which irritated Monsieur Kamel even more. I was proud of what I’d done, and I wasn’t going to back down. Mounir had shown the way; I would follow him.
The instructor threw me a look of disgust, then turned to another student. Now somebody else would bear the brunt of his rage. I was safe, at least for that day; after that, we would see.
Neila whispered: “What got into you? Why didn’t you answer? You gave me all your notes the day before yesterday.”
“I didn’t want to. It’s my choice. I don’t want to talk to that hypocrite ever again.”
Hiding her mouth with her hand, Neila did all she could not to laugh. I’d given her a bit of pleasure. That made me even prouder of myself. Too quickly she calmed down and sat straight upright in her seat for the rest of the lesson.
Later, on the way home from school, we walked in silence through the back alleys. It was dark, and light gleamed from the windows of the fine houses. The streetlamps were out, as the rioters had shattered all the bulbs.
Suddenly Neila said, “Nadia, was it Mounir’s arrest that made you act that way toward Monsieur Kamel this morning?”
My eyes lit up; my body, which had become hard to carry, and my heavy hands were transformed by the few words Neila had spoken. She understood! She understood how hurt I was, how shocked. I knew it; Neila was my best friend. The smartest girl in the class. I felt myself coming back to life. I wanted to run all the way home.
“Yes! I did it to defy this rotten system of ours. I refuse to speak to that failure who called me a dunce. I don’t want to have to look at that mug of his while Mounir is under arrest for revolting against injustice. The state pays our instructors to stuff our heads with useless information, to teach us better ways to keep quiet, and to put up with injustice.”
“But where are you getting that revolutionary talk from?” she cut me off. “Is it that Karl what’s-his-name who says so in his book?”
I smiled a bitter smile.
“Karl Marx, Neila. It’s Karl Marx. Remember the name and cut the nonsense. But it’s not him! Those are my own ideas. I kept them to myself because of my family, because of my teachers, because I was afraid to speak up, because of my egoism and my indifference. But you know something, what little Mohamed told us forced me to break out of my little bubble. And it was the thought of Mounir’s face that gave me the courage to stand up to the instructor. It was the hope in his sad eyes that made me think, and think again. See what I mean?”
We stopped short, one facing the other. Two young girls in the darkness. From the distance came the barking of the watchdogs that guarded the luxurious villas. Those dogs would sink their teeth into anyone who came too close. But we were frightened no longer. There, facing one another, the tears streamed down our cheeks, we revealed our unhappiness for the first time.
“I promise, Neila. I’ll never be the same as before. I’m ready to change the world.”
Neila wiped away a tear; a timid smile fluttered on her lips.
“I don’t know if I can change the world. But I’ll do everything I can to save Mounir and to encourage you, my dear Nadia.”
We threw ourselves into each other’s arms. The wind was whipping our hair; the dogs were barking louder than ever. We stood there, motionless. The couscous revolt had sealed our friendship, for life.
FOURTEEN
Tunis, December 12, 2010
“Life hasn’t been easy for me, understand?’
Uncle Mounir’s eyelashes were fluttering. He was not looking at me; he was gazing into the distance instead, as if he was trying to bring the past into focus.
“I’ve been through too much. Ours was a poor family with five kids that had to keep moving from one place to another. No sooner did my father finish building a gourbi out of stone, brick, old scraps of cement, and sheet metal, than we had to build another. The police or the neighbourhood delegates of the Destourian Party would come calling and order Father to demolish the gourbi he’d just built. He did as they said, but started work on another one right away. Poverty moved in with us, became another member of the family. Until the day when a party delegate came knocking and made Father an offer. The government would give us a house, let’s call it social housing, and in return Father would work as a day watchman for the municipality. The only condition was that he wouldn’t be paid. It was their way of making him pay for the house we were living in. He accepted. What else could he do? It was like choosing between suffering less or suffering more. His choice was to suffer for us. My mother, my brothers, and my sisters were tired of always moving from one place to another, and even our animals — the few sheep and chickens we possessed — had had enough. So, rain or shine, my father sat on an old chair next to the entrance to city hall. His job was to report every day to the party delegate. He knew that he was reporting everyone’s comings and goings, he knew he was a kaouad, which is what we call shills. Besides, I’m not even sure there was really such a job. And when he wasn’t sitting right beside the entrance to city hall, Father took his donkey and cart and went off to sell manure to the people who live in the fancy neighbourhoods that had sprung up all around us. Time and again we had to move. The new residents had the money and the contacts they needed to buy the land and build their private palaces. But my father had neither the money nor the contacts. He spent his whole life between an old chair and a donkey cart. That’s what poverty and injustice did to us.”
Uncle Mounir stopped for a moment, then, still looking off into the distance, he went on: “I hated what the government had done to my father and one day, after I’d read Capital by Karl Marx, I swore that I would change things when I grew up. I wanted to spare my family the humiliation and the poverty, but I was too young, too idealistic.”
His story excited me so much that I forgot my fears of only a few moments before.
“But you weren’t asking for the moon, all you wanted was a little dignity, if I understand. What does that have to do with idealism?”
He looked at me for the first time since we’d stepped out onto the balcony, as if he was surprised to see me there. But just as quickly, his gaze shifted off into the distance once more.
“That’s the problem. It’s almost impossible to protect your dignity in this country. Asking for it is like asking for the moon. When one of my instructors began to lend me books by Samir Amin, an economist who specialized in developing countries, it was as if I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I thought that my family’s problems, and those of others like us, would be solved by a revolution. A social and economic revolution. ‘Equality from the bottom up,’ as we put it, so proud to use such sophisticated terminology. It would be a revolt of the poor against the mafia-style political power that controlled our lives. At university, I became active in the students’ union. I wasn’t one hundred percent Communist, and I wasn’t one hundred percent Islamist. I was a hybrid. A dangerous and explosive mixture. For the police and the intelligence services at any rate. Nobody knew it, but I began talking with the workers on the construction sites not far from campus. I asked them if they wanted to improve their financial situation, to have medical care. They were young guys, seventeen or eighteen years old. They’d come
in from the countryside, but there was no work for them in the towns and cities. There was never any serious agrarian reform in Tunisia. Every time they tried, it failed, and we ended up with more corruption, more young people unemployed, and more people leaving the land. The best they could hope for was to find jobs as apprentices on the construction sites that were sprouting up all over the Tunis suburbs and send their miserable pay back to their families in the village. I talked with them and encouraged them to set up a union, to unite against the greedy foremen and the contractors who paid them starvation wages and left them to sleep on the construction sites. No insurance, no social programs. Nothing. They had to make do with bitter black tea and a baguette spread with harissa to get through the day. Some of them would listen to me attentively, but most of them didn’t want to hear a thing. One of them ratted on me to the police. You reach out a hand to help them, and they cut it off, and throw you to the lions, see what I mean?”
I couldn’t tell what he was driving at. “Does that mean I shouldn’t go with Donia and her friend Jamel to help the poor and denounce injustice?”
He did not reply; it was as though he hadn’t even heard me. “The police came for me two days after the bread riots started in Tunis. I had comrades who kept me up to date on the situation in other towns. Tozeur in the south. Gafsa, where all the mines are. Me and other student unionists, we’d made up our minds to start demonstrating in Tunis. A lot of young people came out. We weren’t expecting violence, but it happened. We were against the increases in the price of bread and semolina, but we were also against injustice, against nepotism. We wanted a fair chance for everybody. We wanted to alert the middle class about the way the poor were being treated. The unemployment. The humiliation. Whether we went to school or not, nothing was going to change for us. We were poor, and we’d stay poor. We were modern-day Misérables. The government ignored us. So did everybody else. But the young people of Djebel Lahmar, the ‘red mount’ — the colour of blood and of danger — from Ettadamoun Township, from Sijoumi, from Bab Souika, all the slums and the working-class districts, came out in the thousands when the unions sent out the call, but still more came out on their own. It was a cry of pain. A cry of despair.”
