In the Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  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 parlor, 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 afterward 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 workers 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, fruit flies 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 anymore.”

  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 . . .”

  Make her shut up, thought Selma, make her let me go. But the old woman went on, fingering her ivory cross, which had been smoothed to a shine.

  “Right now you’re in love and it’s wonderful. You believe everything the boys tell you. You imagine that it will last and that they’ll always love you as much as they do now. Next to that, your studies seem unimportant. But you don’t know anything about life! One day you’ll have sacrificed everything for them, you’ll have nothing left, and you’ll be completely dependent on them. At the mercy of their good moods, their affection, their brutality. Believe me when I tell you that you must think about your future. You must study. Times have changed. You are not doomed to the same fate as your mother. You could become someone, a lawyer, a teacher, a nurse. Or even a pilot! Haven’t you heard about that girl, Touria Chaoui, who passed her flying exam at sixteen? You can be whatever you want to be, if you work for it. And you will never ever have to ask a man for money.”

  Selma listened, hands tightly gripping her glass of tea. She listened so attentively that Mademoiselle Fabre thought she’d managed to convince her. “Go back to school. Study for your exams. I’ll help you if you need help. Mademoiselle, promise me you won’t give up.” Selma thanked her, kissed her wrinkled cheeks, and said: “I promise.”

  But as she walked back home Selma thought about the old woman’s face, her skin as white as chalk, her lips so thin that she looked like she’d eaten her own mouth. Alone in the narrow streets, she laughed and thought: What does that old nun know about men? What does she know about love? She felt a vast contempt for the Frenchwoman’s fat, sad body, for her solitary existence, for those ideals of hers which were nothing more, in truth, than a way of masking the lack of tenderness in her life. The previous day, Selma had kissed a boy. And ever since, she’d found herself constantly wondering how it was possible that men—who bullied and oppressed her—could also be the ones she was so desperate to be with. Yes, a boy had kissed her and she remembered with superhuman accuracy the precise path that his kisses had taken on her skin. She kept closing her eyes and reliving that delicious moment, her excitement unfading. She saw again the boy’s pale-blue eyes, she heard his voice, the words he spoke—“Are you trembling?”—and a shiver ran through her body. She was a prisoner of that memory, she dwelled on it constantly, and touched her fingertips to her mouth, to her neck, as if trying to find the trace of a wound, a mark that the boy’s mouth had left on her. Each time he’d put his lips on her skin she’d felt as though he was liberating her from fear, from the cowardice in which she’d been raised.

  Was that what men were for? Was that why everyone talked about love all the time? Yes, they mined the courage that lay deep in your heart, they brought it out into the daylight and forced it to bloom. At the thought of a kiss, a new kiss, she felt an immense strength fill her. How right they are, she thought, walking up the stairs to her bedroom, how right they are to suspect us and to warn us, because what we’re hiding, under our veils and our skirts, is so fiery and glorious that we might betray anything for it.

  At the end of March a cold snap hit Meknes and the water in the patio well froze. Mouilala fell ill and was bedridden for days, her thin face barely visible above the thick layer of blankets that Yasmine spread over her. Mathilde often came to see her and tried to make her better in spite of her resistance, her refusal to swallow the medicines. Mathilde had to treat her like a scared and willful child. Mouilala did recover, but when she finally got out of bed and went to the kitchen, in a dressing gown that Mathilde had given her, she realized that something was wrong. At first she didn’t know what it was that was making her panic like this, giving her the feeling of being a stranger in her own home. She walked through the corridor, shaking off Yasmine, and went up and down the stairs despite the pain in her legs. She leaned out of the window and looked at the street, which seemed to her oddly dull, as if something had been stolen from it. Was it possible that the world had changed so much during the few weeks that she’d been ill? She thought she was going crazy, that demons had taken possession of her just as they had her son Jalil. She remembered stories she’d heard about her ancestors, who would parade half naked in the streets and talk to ghosts. So now she’d been struck by the family curse and she was slowly losing her mind . . . She was frightened. To calm herself she did what she always did. She sat in the kitchen, grabbed a bunch of coriander and began mincing it. Then she raised her hands, their fingers twisted and covered with finely chopped herbs, to her mouth, to her nose, coating her face with the minced coriander until she started to cry. She stuck her fingers in her nose, rubbed her eyes like a madwoman. Still she couldn’t smell anything. With some witchcraft that she didn’t understand, the illness had robbed her of her sense of smell.

  So it was that she didn’t notice when her daughter came home smelling of stale tobacco and dust from building sites. Mouilala was unaware of the cheap perfume that Selma had bought in the medina with stolen money and which clung to the fabric of her blouses. Above all the old woman couldn’t tell that the sugary perfume was mingled with the fresh citrus odor of a man’s cologne. Selma would come home every evening, her cheeks red, her hair tangled, her breath
smelling of another’s mouth. She would sing on the patio, talk to her mother with shining eyes, and hug her sweetly. “I love you so much, Mama!” she would say.

  —

  One evening Mathilde was waiting for Amine when he came home. “I was in town today,” she told him. “I saw your mother.” Mouilala had behaved strangely toward Aïcha. When the child had put her mouth close to her grandmother’s hand, the old woman had started yelling. “She accused Aïcha of trying to bite her. She was sobbing and holding her hand to her chest. She was really frightened, Amine, you understand?” Yes, he understood. He’d already noticed his mother’s thinness, her vacant gaze, her absences. She’d stopped dyeing her hair with henna and she sometimes left her bedroom without first tying her headscarf over her gray hair. When Mathilde had gone to see her, she could have sworn that Mouilala hadn’t recognized her. The old woman had stared at her for a few seconds, glassy-eyed and openmouthed, and then she’d looked relieved. She hadn’t pronounced her daughter-in-law’s name—she never did—but she’d smiled and put her hand on the young woman’s arm. Mouilala would spend hours sitting at the kitchen table, staring limply at baskets of vegetables. When her mind recovered some of its old strength she would stand up and start cooking, but her meals didn’t taste the way they used to. She would forget ingredients or fall asleep on her wooden chair and let the bottom of the tajine burn. This woman who had always been so silent and austere now spent her days humming childish songs that made her burst out laughing. She walked in circles and lifted up her kaftan while sticking her tongue out at Yasmine.

  “We can’t just leave her like that,” said Mathilde. Amine took off his boots, hung his jacket on the chair in the entrance hall and said nothing. “She should come and live with us. Selma too.” His wife stood with her hands on her hips, watching him tenderly. When Amine glanced at her she saw the passion in his eyes. Surprised, she touched her hair flirtatiously and untied the string of the apron she was wearing. At that moment he regretted his inarticulacy. He wished he was one of those men who find the time to think deeply and show tenderness, the time to express all that they carry in their hearts. He observed her for a long time, thinking that she’d become a woman of this country, that she suffered just like he did, that she worked just as hard, and that he was incapable of thanking her.

  “Yes, you’re right. Anyway, I didn’t like them being alone there, in the medina, with no man to protect them.” He walked over to Mathilde, stood on tiptoe and slowly kissed her cheek, which she’d leaned down toward him.

  At the start of spring Amine helped his mother move. Jalil was sent to stay with an uncle, a holy man who lived near Ifrane and who assured them that the altitude would be good for his nephew’s weak mind. Yasmine, who had never seen snow, offered to go with him. Mouilala was given the brightest room, near the entrance of the house. Selma had to share a bedroom with Aïcha and Selim, but Mourad had managed to get hold of some bricks and mortar and he’d begun building a new wing to the house.

  Mouilala rarely left her room. Often Mathilde would find her sitting by the window, staring at the red-tiled floor. Wrapped up in white, she would gently nod her head, revisiting a life of silence, a mute existence where grief was forbidden. Her dark, wrinkled hands stood out against the white fabric. Those hands seemed to contain this woman’s entire life, like a book without words. Selim spent a lot of time with her. He would sit on the floor, his head resting in his grandmother’s lap, and he’d close his eyes while she stroked his back and nape. He refused to eat anywhere except in the old woman’s bedroom, and they had to accept the bad habits he formed there: eating with his fingers and burping noisily. Mouilala, who had for as long as Mathilde had known her been very thin and only ever eaten other people’s leftovers, was now a terrible glutton, as many old people are in their last years, finding in these frivolous pleasures one last particle of meaning.

  —

  All day long Mathilde rushed about: from school to home, from the kitchen to the laundry room. She washed the old woman’s thighs and her son’s thighs too. She made meals for everyone and ate standing up, because she didn’t have time to sit. In the morning, when she was back from the school, she healed the sick then washed and ironed clothes. In the afternoon she went to the suppliers and brought chemical products or spare parts. She lived in a state of permanent anxiety: for their finances, for Mouilala’s health, for her children. She worried about Amine’s dark moods. The day that Selma arrived at the farm, her husband had warned Mathilde: “I don’t want her going near the men. I don’t want her hanging around. It’s school and home and that’s all, you understand?” Mathilde had nodded, her heart torn with anguish. When her brother wasn’t there—which was most of the time—Selma was insolent and cruel. Mathilde gave her orders, but Selma just ignored them. “You’re not my mother,” she said.

  Mathilde feared the violent rains of March, the hail that the laborers had been predicting because of the yellow late-afternoon skies. She jumped when the telephone rang and prayed, hand on the receiver, that it wasn’t the bank or either of the schools. Often Corinne would call her mid-afternoon and invite her to come for tea. “You’re allowed to have fun, you know!”

  The letters that Mathilde wrote to Irène now were dry and formal, with no secrets or feelings. She asked her sister to send her recipes for meals from their childhood. She would have liked to be a perfect housewife, like the ones who appeared in the magazines that Corinne lent her. The ones who knew how to run a household, who kept the peace, the ones who held everything together through a combination of love and fear. But as Aïcha told her one day in her reedy little voice: “Anyway, everything goes wrong in the end.” Mathilde didn’t contradict her. She would peel vegetables while reading a book. She would hide novels in the pockets of her aprons and sometimes she would sit on a pile of laundry that needed ironing to read novels by Henri Troyat or Anaïs Nin that she’d borrowed from the Mercier widow. She cooked dishes that Amine hated. Potato salads covered with onions and stinking of vinegar, platefuls of cabbage that she boiled for so long that the house reeked of it for days, meat loaves so dry that Aïcha spat them out and hid the remains in the pocket of her jacket. Amine complained. With his fork he pushed away cutlets drenched in cream, which were not suited to this climate. He missed his mother’s cooking and convinced himself that Mathilde was just provoking him by claiming that she didn’t like couscous and lentils with smoked meat. At mealtimes she would encourage the children to talk, asking them lots of questions, and she’d laugh when they banged their spoons on the table and demanded dessert. Then Amine would grow angry with these disrespectful, noisy children, he would curse this house where he could no longer find the peace that a working man had a right to expect. Mathilde would pick up Selim, take a dirty handkerchief from her sleeve and cry. One evening, watched by his astounded daughter, Amine started singing a Maurice Chevalier song: “She cried like a baby, she cried and cried and cried . . . She cried like a fountain, all the tears she had inside . . .” He pursued Mathilde into the corridor and shouted: “Oh là là, what a tragedy! What a tragedy!” And Mathilde, wild with rage, screamed insults in Alsatian. When they asked her, later, what those words had meant, she would always refuse to explain.

  Mathilde put on weight and a few white hairs appeared at her temples. During the daytime she wore a wide raffia hat, like the ones the peasants wore, and black rubber sandals. The skin on her cheeks and neck was scattered with little brown patches and fine lines started to form. Sometimes, at the ends of those interminable days, she sank into a profound melancholy. On the way to school, her face caressed by the wind, she thought about how she’d first come to this land ten years earlier, and what had she accomplished during all that time? What would she leave behind? Hundreds of meals eaten and vanished, fleeting moments of happiness of which no trace remained, songs whispered at a child’s bedside, afternoons spent consoling people for long-forgotten sadnesses. Sleeves resewn, solitary anxietie
s that she never shared with anyone out of a fear of being mocked. Whatever she did—and however great and sincere the gratitude of her children and her patients—it seemed to Mathilde that her life was constantly being swallowed up. Everything she achieved was doomed to disappear, to be erased. That was the fate of all small, domestic lives, she thought, where endless repetition of the same tasks ended up eating away the soul. She looked through the window at the plantations of almond trees, the acres of vines, the young shrubs reaching maturity that would—in a year or two—start bearing fruit. She envied Amine this domain he’d built, stone by stone, and which, that year—1955—was providing him with his first feelings of satisfaction.