The two women crossed once in a hospital hallway.
“Haven’t you done enough?” Malika asked. “Won’t you leave him alone now?”
“Who else can heal him?” Fatima snapped. “Can you?”
“Have you no shame?”
“Have you no feeling for him?”
“I’ve come to be with my children’s father.”
“I’ve come to be with my lover.”
They worked out an arrangement, unspoken, by which they would not have to meet again. Malika stayed with Ameur during the hospital’s visiting hours, sitting quietly beside his bed. Fatima came afterward, as Ameur’s doctor, and spent the nights with him.
It is said that comas may be pierced—that through the intensity of the sleep, some patients may hear and feel the world around them, though they cannot respond to it. Upon recovery, some may even remember the details of their experience. But Ameur was not among them. If in some dreamlike state he was aware of the vigils held beside him, if he heard Malika’s soft voice or felt the breath of Fatima, his solitude was no less absolute. He had made a mess of things. The coma was an escape. With every day he slept, he drifted further away.
FATIMA COULD NOT accept that Ameur might never return. Malika knew Ameur better. Years before she had discovered inside of him an uncertain core that no one else suspected. It was the reason he stayed within the oases, and never ventured far into the open desert, and felt uncomfortable without a telephone nearby. It was the reason he kept Malika pregnant. He was terrified of thirsts—of his own, and of hers when she was alone. Now Malika could sense the depth of his abandonment.
Ameur had not prepared her for this freedom. He had left her with four young children, an old Peugeot with bad wipers, a small house in Ouargla, and a kingdom of fickle friends. Ameur’s employer, the Algerian civil service, would not be of much help, since Ameur had not been injured on the job. No doubt there were debts to be called in, but from whom? There was a bit of cash hidden around the house, but already the oldest boy wanted sneakers and a basketball, and the oldest girl needed school supplies. There would be medical bills. Eventually there would be the question of caring for Ameur. To make matters worse a civil war was brewing. Malika had no idea how the family would survive. Still, she neither cried nor sought release; she had long ago learned patience and acceptance. And she was learning new lessons now, even if she could not yet appreciate them. The desert teaches by testing.
Time imposed its order. Malika’s first battle was with Saint-Sulpice, the hospital, where an administrator threatened to discharge the still-comatose Ameur because the Algerian government had not answered the formal request to accept financial responsibility for him. Malika asked for more time. The hospital gave her another two days. Malika pleaded for understanding, and promised that the Algerian government would eventually get the paperwork in order. The hospital responded with indifference.
I WAS PASSING through Paris. It was a typically gray and wet afternoon. Malika waited for me on the street outside the hospital. I recognized her even from a distance with a sort of jolt. She was dressed like an elegant Parisian in a scarf and tailored dress. She led me inside, but not to Ameur. To my surprise, she took me instead to the cramped fourth-floor office of her tormentor, an overthin blonde with a ring for every finger, whose title was “social worker.” The social worker must have been confused by my presence, which I myself did not understand. Malika may have hoped I would intervene, or she may simply have wanted my company. I said nothing. The social worker avoided my eyes.
Malika promised her again that Ameur was insured by his employer, the Ministry of Transportation, and that eventual payment was guaranteed.
The social worker was unmoved. “I regret, madame, that your word alone does not suffice.”
Malika answered simply, “Oui, madame,” because she had run out of ideas.
The social worker said, “You would find it useful to remember that you are not in Algeria now, but in France.”
“Oui, madame.”
Rain blew drearily against the office window. The social worker picked up Ameur’s file, and began, once again, to read through it. She had decorated her walls with posters of modern dance. She had a radio, two lamps, a computer screen, a keyboard, and a collection of serious novels, some in translation.
I did not know the woman, but silently constructed a world for her. I imagined a small apartment in the suburbs, and a long metro ride home each day. I guessed she followed the movies, and intended still to enjoy Paris, but I doubted whether in practice she went out much anymore. In a city that exalts youth, she had started wearing too much makeup. Now she lived trapped in a new Europe, shuffling hospital papers at a level beneath her education, remembering her schoolgirl ideals, but obviously unable to shake her anger with foreigners.
For years now she must have seen these Saharans parading through her office, pleading their cases in thick-tongued French, with the old-fashioned uneasy attitude of the peasant, servile and insolent. No matter how firmly she described hospital procedures to them, they asked for exceptions, implying that she had the power, as if all the world were corruptible. Malika was not the first she had warned of the differences between Algeria and France.
I don’t think she saw Malika so much as catalogued her. Down in Ward Five, on the second floor, lay some Saharan in a coma. Malika was his wife. He had a second wife here too, squabbling over love. There were Algerians who had fought with knives in the hospital halls. There were many more who had sworn to pay their bills, and had not. So in denying Malika, she was on familiar ground. And of course she was right.
“Algeria has hospitals of its own,” she said.
Malika sat looking down at her hands. “Please. He has four children. You don’t know Algeria. You will kill him if you send him back.”
The social worker frowned and studied the file again. I may have misjudged her. She shrugged. Her superiors were pressuring her, but she would argue Ameur’s case, for all the good it would do. Malika said nothing. The social worker mentioned that she had been to Tunisia and had visited the desert. What she needed now was a document, a telegram perhaps to show that efforts were being made, a scrap of paper with an official seal, anything really.
Malika and I walked away from the office. I expected she would be grateful, but found instead that she had turned angry. The anger robbed Malika of her softness and seemed to surprise her, as if she weren’t used to the emotion. And rather than fading, it grew stronger. “She is nothing but a racist!” she said furiously. “Did you see how she hated me? A foul racist, did you see?”
I did not answer, because Malika must have known that the problem lay deeper.
Malika said, “I won’t humble myself again!”
This was closer to the truth. Malika had begun to leave the desert.
IN A MUSTY ward of a dozen beds screened by curtains, Malika led me to Ameur. I would not have recognized him. He lay on his back, breathing shallowly, pale, emaciated, and mostly naked. His eyes rested half-open, but were milky and unseeing. Tubes ran into his nose and arms, and a heart monitor was taped to his ribs. His mustache had been shaved off, and replaced by the stubble that spread across his chin. The bruise on his head still looked large and raw. I laid a picture book of Cape Cod on his bed, an offering to his former life. He had talked of visiting the world. But when I squeezed his hand, it felt as rubbery as the hand of a corpse. I thought he stank of death.
A male nurse strode in and slapped him on the chest. “Wake up, Monsieur Belouard, you have a friend from America!”
But he would not wake up. I watched Malika. She sponged him down and neatened his sheets. She spoke firmly to him, as if he were a child. She stood quietly. She did not love him, but loved his children. This understanding passed between us.
Afterward we sat together in a brasserie crowded with evening customers. We shared a table at the front of the establishment, by the sidewalk windows. Outside, the rain had turned cold, and the city’s li
ghts reflected on the pavement in colors that slowly grew richer with the night. We drank tea. Malika told me about her stay in Paris.
“Afternoons I go to the hospital. Mornings, I spend at the Algerian embassy, trying to get them to finish Ameur’s paperwork. But it’s just like Algeria in there: the officials are arrogant, and nothing gets done.”
I asked where she was staying in Paris. She said, “With old friends, a family that lives here now.” She was proud or brave, and did not want to complain. Only after I pressed her did she admit that they were ten, crowded into a two-room apartment in a tough neighborhood below Montmartre. In her spare time she helped with the housework, and she wrote letters to the children at home in Ouargla. “Already I’ve been gone two weeks. The two youngest ones don’t understand—how could they?”
“And if Ameur remains in the coma?”
“It’s very difficult for me. You know I have a duty as mother as well as a wife.”
But beneath this burden, I heard Malika’s relief. She seemed to be discovering a duty to herself as well. There was a special radiance to her. In the way she angled her legs, in the way she shifted her body, in the line of her neck, she carried her beauty with subtlety and grace. Men watched her. She was vital. She leaned forward and touched my arm in secret celebration of her freedom. She was in no hurry to leave the brasserie. She carried the picture book of Cape Cod. Like Ameur, she wanted to talk about the world.
Each afternoon I met her at the hospital, beside Ameur. Each evening at the brasserie I watched her shed the Sahara. Sometimes she seemed obsessed with Fatima, against whom she could rail for minutes in tight, bitter monologues. Then she would fall silent, and visibly shake herself free. She was fighting an elemental fight—this dwelling on Fatima, so closely connected to her old life with Ameur, followed by the rising above it, which was new. I don’t think she analyzed it, because in Paris, under the shock of change, she was operating mostly by instinct.
When I asked her about Ouargla, she answered with unfinished thoughts. “The Sahara is no place for a woman,” she said. She meant a desert neither of sand nor gravel, but of life contained within a cinder-block house in a certain part of town.
She did most of the talking now, sounding at times like an effervescent girl but more often like an angry wife. She said that a woman in Ouargla, once she is married, lives under house arrest. A woman is allowed out, but only under veil. She may scurry to a neighbor’s house, or visit her sisters, or with other women slip furtively to the market. But even this she must not do frequently. Her desert is occupied by her husband and his brothers.
When one evening Malika mentioned that Ameur had beaten her, I did not interrupt to ask why or how often, or why she had stayed with him afterward. There comes a point in conversation beyond which there are no limits to intimacy. I had my own impulses to fight.
The following night, Malika spoke again about Ameur. She said he was born too late to fight the war of independence, but not too late to share in the victory. He moved to the Sahara because of its oil, to become a modern man. He did not think of himself as a real Saharan, and never intended to cloister his young wife. But the oases taught him that all women are weak. When Ameur saw Malika through the eyes of his new friends he felt a poison inside. He began to make requests about her clothes and behavior. He veiled her. The veiling did not help, and the poison spread farther. Malika was not to be trusted. Ameur’s affairs with other women only confirmed his fears and made him more angry. He wielded Fatima like a weapon. He taunted Malika with her. When he sought salvation in Islam he could stop drinking, but he could not stop this.
Malika’s talk at times disoriented me. I watched her emotions, and heard her words, but could not pretend to see things as she saw them. I myself judged Ameur as another man, in that sense like myself. Did Malika not understand the irony of talking about her life, like this, to me? I studied her face and her body. I was hardly a neutral confidant.
Lying in his hospital bed, Ameur drifted on. The French doctors told Malika that even if he emerged from his sleep he would probably require care the rest of his life.
Malika had to return to her children. I had to go to Algiers on business. We flew from Paris together, on Air Algeria. Malika still played the good wife. She said if Ameur was returned to Ouargla, she would grow old beside him here, and if he was returned instead to Algiers, she would move with him into his mother’s house, to live under the domination of his family. She seemed resigned to this fate.
During the flight I offered no opinion because I had none that could possibly matter to her. Sympathy without action is a cheap emotion, and it can sound like a promise to help. But of course I could not help Malika. Most people live in hard places in hard times.
Bitterly Malika said, “No one is concerned with our lives as women. We serve our husbands, our brothers-in-law, our mothers-in-law. If we are unfortunate and have an unhappy marriage, there is nothing we can do. That is just life. I am here for my children.”
When one of the airline stewards, a man who knew Ameur, scolded her for the way she was dressed, she looked chagrined. As we crossed the Mediterranean, she drew a scarf over her head.
MONTHS LATER, AMEUR emerged from his coma. He was paralyzed, speechless, disoriented, unresponsive. Never having received payment, the French deported him. The Algerians sent him to a military hospital in Algiers. I went to see him there. He squeezed my hand, but did not recognize me. When he grew agitated, an orderly strapped him down. The hospital could do nothing more for him. He went to live with his ancient mother in a ruined farmhouse in the slums of Algiers.
Malika had spent the time thinking. She closed up the house in Ouargla, locked Ameur’s car into the courtyard, and took the children to Algiers. She took them to see Ameur in the ruined farmhouse. But then, rather than moving in with him as expected, she took her children to live across the city with her sister Zora. She said the farmhouse was too small for the entire family, but no one was fooled. Her in-laws were outraged. On what grounds did she take this act upon herself? Where was the daughter they had known? They demanded her labor. They demanded her obedience. They demanded the car in Ouargla. When Malika looked away, they damned her. By the standards of the desert they were right, but Malika refused to submit.
OUARGLA REMAINED UNFORGIVING. On my final return, by taxi from El Oued on the long way south, I found sand piling against a corner of Ameur’s house. The cracks in the courtyard wall had grown wider. Ameur’s old car sat on flat tires. The television antenna had toppled.
Out of habit, the hotel clerks still listened in on my phone conversations. I called Ishmael, the air-traffic controller; he took me to a late-night session with Ameur’s old friends in the ksar. They wanted as usual to talk about women. The same one said, “We Saharans are great girl-chasers.” The same one said, “Someday there will be six times more women than men in the Sahara.” Ishmael wanted to talk about Malika. He called her a bad wife, because by the standards of Ouargla she had become a public woman. He talked about her as if she were available for his satisfaction. He never once mentioned Ameur. I had no patience for him, and kept checking my watch. For me Ouargla was already a memory. Later that night I took a taxi deeper into the desert.
11
PRISONERS
OF THE
OASIS
THE ROAD THAT night stretched across black stony flatlands, swerved, and stretched again. It went on hour after hour. The taxi was old and slow, but durable. It rattled through the darkness. I sat beside the driver, a gruff, silent man with a lined face lit by the reflection of the headlights. Behind us, the passengers slept. We came to the oasis just before dawn, when the road started down into a narrow, steep-walled valley. We took another turn, and the valley spread below us in a sprinkling of electric lights. It was the famed M’Zab: five walled towns, the home of 100,000 people and twice as many palms, where wells strike water at a hundred feet, and gardens will grow.
The M’Zab was settled a thousand years a
go by an Islamic sect fleeing persecution in the north. They spoke a distinct Berber dialect, married among themselves, and developed recognizably sharp-faced features. They became known as Mozabites. Though eventually they became traders, opening shops through all the oases, they never gave up their feeling of separateness. During the war against the French, they let the fighting pass them by. The attempt by independent Algeria to sell the M’Zab to tourism never quite worked. Even today the Mozabites cling to their traditions. Old men wear antique pantaloons, and women of all ages, when they venture out, swaddle themselves in white woolen shrouds, allowing only a single eye to show. Islamic radicals recently attacked and killed a group of foreign pipeline workers here. One of the towns still closes its gates every night against strangers and infidels.
By the day’s first light our taxi passed through an army checkpoint, and on into the valley. We overtook a man on a donkey cart hauling firewood from the palm grove to the market. We turned around a traffic circle and a concrete monument to national independence, swerved once to avoid a pickup truck, and swerved again to avoid a horse. The oasis was coming to life. At dawn the valley’s walls echoed with amplified exaltations of Allah, the haunting calls to prayer. We arrived at the marketplace of Ghardaïa, the M’Zab’s main town. The Mozabite on the donkey cart arrived later in the old-fashioned way, by beating his beast.
The M’Zab is the diving board for the deep Sahara, the point from which the bus sets off into the wilderness. The bus follows a route called the Trans-Saharan, which is shown on maps in bold ink, as if it were an established highway. You might expect gas stations and the occasional motel. But the maps reflect ambitions that have never been realized. A road from north to south across the Sahara would have to cross 2,000 miles of the most tormented land on earth, conquering drought and flash flood, canyon and mountain, salt, sand, mud, rock, and war. And then it would have to be maintained.
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