Only a Woman
Amel Benaboura
Translated from the French by Jeremy L. Paretsky
“I krame, go see who’s knocking at the door,” her mother calls from the kitchen.
The little girl carefully stores her little picture book under a pillow and runs to the door. Suddenly she freezes. Suppose it’s Nabil? No, Nabil has a key. Furthermore, he never knocks before entering. Ikrame gets up on tiptoes in her slippered feet, works the bolt, and opens the door. A lady is standing on the landing, tall, beautiful, wrapped in a velvet coat. Her manner of dress disturbs the child, who glances fearfully toward the staircase. Suppose her brother Nabil saw that! she thinks, shuddering.
“Are you Yamina’s little sister?” the lady asks.
“Yes.”
“Is she home?”
Ikrame raises her fingers to her mouth in an agony of indecision. She hesitates at the foolhardy getup of this unknown woman. “Nabil doesn’t like women who wear European clothes,” she thinks it necessary to point out.
“Oh? And why?”
“He says that women who do not wear the hajib aren’t real Muslims and deserve to be punished.”
The lady pats her on the cheek. “He’s entitled to think whatever he wants, but that doesn’t mean he’s right. Go tell your sister that Mrs. Rais is here.”
Ikrame acknowledges this with a nod and runs to her sister’s room.
Yamina is feeling the bruises on her face. Her hand is shaking as she picks up the mirror. The olive-dark circles ringing her eyes are still there. The swollen lip deforms her mouth. The scar on her cheek is hideous.
She drops the mirror, weary, infuriated, her face haggard.
“Tell her I’ve gone out.”
Ikrame raises her eyebrows in amazement. “I can’t lie to her. That’s a sin. Nabil hates liars. He beats them horribly.”
Against her will Yamina gets up painfully and follows her little sister. The lady heaves a sigh of relief. “Thank God, you’re on your feet. I thought you’d been laid up by some illness. I … Good God! What’s happened to you, my dear?”
Yamina invites the visitor in, conducts her to the living room, and offers her a rickety chair. Mrs. Rais sits down, mouth agape, incredulous. She lets out a squeak: “My poor girl!”
“Please,” Yamina begs, “let it be.”
They remain silent for a long while, Mrs. Rais unable to find her voice and Yamina leaning against the wall. “Was it an accident?” the visitor mumbles at last.
Yamina asks her younger sister to go fetch a cup of coffee for the lady. Then she lets herself drop down onto a pillow, not raising her head. “Why have you come, Mrs. Rais?”
“Come now, it’s the least I could do. You’re not in the habit of being gone two weeks in a row without letting us know. We’re beginning to worry about you at the office.”
“That’s all over and done with.”
“What is?”
“The office!” Yamina groans, as though something is caught in her throat.
Mrs. Rais does not quite seem to catch on. “What exactly does that mean?”
“I’m not going to work anymore. I’m finished with it.”
“That I understood. But why? Is it because of Redouane? You know very well that he loves to tease the girls. I’ll admit he’s something of a creep, but he doesn’t have any ulterior motives.”
Yamina pushes her hair to one side and continues to stare at the floor. Slowly her shoulders hunch and start to shake. Her sobs suddenly pour forth into the silence of the room.
Mrs. Rais gets up from her chair and goes over to put her arm compassionately around her. “Oh, my dear, my poor little darling, why, what’s the matter? Won’t you tell me anything? I’m your friend. Confide in me. Every problem has a solution.”
“You’re wasting your time,” Yamina’s mother says as she comes in with a tray.
Mrs. Rais gets up, kisses the mother respectfully on the forehead, and introduces herself. “I am a colleague of your daughter. Since we’ve had no sign of life from her for two weeks, the director told me to come and see what the matter was. What has happened to your daughter?”
“The same thing that happens to girls in this country every day,” the mother sighs sadly.
Yamina looks up and pleads with her mother to be quiet. The old woman shrugs, puts the tray down on a pedestal table, and sets about pouring the coffee into three cups. “I ruined my own life for her education,” she begins in the singsong voice of a storyteller. “I suffered night and day, did all sorts of degrading jobs so that she could earn the degrees she needed. But instead, when she became an executive in some firm, she abandoned—”
“Mother—”
“Be quiet! I sacrificed my best years for your education. You don’t have any right to give up. Go back to work. It’s the only friend you’ll ever have. One day I’m going to die. Nabil will marry, have children, and start to want the house all for himself. He’ll throw you out, you and Ikrame. Only, then you’ll be sorry for what you do today.”
Mrs. Rais guesses that something serious has happened. The mother explains.
“It’s her stupid brother, Nabil, who’s plaguing her. He’s one of those ‘enlightened.’ He can speak only in terms of prohibitions. To listen to him you’d think the whole world was a garbage dump, where everything is noxious and disgusting. He’s riding like hell all over her. He throws everything she does back in her face, but privately he admits to me that it’s only because he’s jealous of seeing her succeed, where he always seems to fail. So he beats her. Each time her scars close, he manages to make them bleed again, just to keep her locked away. He has forbidden her to take work anywhere men are around. As far as he is concerned, any place where women and men get together is suspect, unhealthy, accursed. He says he is ashamed to see his sister make herself up indecently, so that every morning she can go join the ‘incubuses’ and other degenerates that lurk behind the walls of the firm.”
Mrs. Rais is not unduly astonished. At the same time she cannot approve of her colleague’s decision. “It’s not that bad, Yamina. You’re an executive, remember that. You’re not going to turn your back on all the years you put in at the university, just because some ignoramus of a brother—”
“He swore he would kill me!” Yamina explodes.
“They all say they’ll do that. We’re not cattle.”
“He’s a lout. He’s capable of anything.”
“He makes you believe it, dear. Come now, the age of the all-powerful male is over and done with.”
“He’s a brute, a brute!”
The lady is deeply moved; she stretches out her hand to tilt up Yamina’s face lined with scars, and looks her in the eyes. “I, too, am a woman. What you resent, I, too, have suffered. I have been forbidden to do things, and I have received affronts and warnings for my actions. But I answered back. I took responsibility for myself. I fought like a maniac. Today I enjoy the well-earned rest of a successful warrior. I marked out my road with my own hands. I go where I want, with my head held high. And know that I married the man I love. We can no longer speak of acquiescence. We must resist, always resist, even if it’s just on principle. If we oppose them, we can escape their control once and for all.”
“My brother is a ravenous beast. Nothing anyone says or does makes any impression on him.”
“So? Our ribs are not some stepladder at the disposal of others. This coming Friday, the Women’s Association is organizing a march to protest against men’s unpunished acts of violence, and for the liberation of women. You should come with us and cry out your bitterness and defiance for our whole society to hear.”
“You’re crazy!”
“If you come—Look at me. I am a woman who burst her bonds, who threw off the straitjacket of prejudices and taboos. I said enough! I am free. No one will ever put me back on a leash again.”
Yamina’s head sinks down; she hunches her shoulders and cries. Her mother leaves the living room, muttering her
annoyance. Through the window the sun is casting its late afternoon light on the two women who stand facing each other.
“Go away,” Yamina begs.
“I’m not going, my dear.”
“Oh yes, you must, and right away. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve had some good luck, but not me. It’s not that I’ve given up. I never had the nerve to begin with. This discussion is pointless! You ask me to look at you, but you forget to take a look at me, me. You don’t see my flayed face, my bent back, my haunted eyes.”
Mrs. Rais suppresses an involuntary whimper of rage. Her hands shake, doing their utmost to shape the air, to give form to her anger. “I can see you perfectly, Yamina. They are trying to make you believe that you don’t count, that you are nothing, nothing but a bruise that can’t be comforted. But that’s not true. Sharpen your nails, make them into claws to defend yourself with, to tear out their eyes with, to bite and to scream. If their arms are stronger and their blows nastier, fight back with your heart. Remind yourself how many times a day you bend your back. Think of your luscious cheeks under their blows, of your ears under their reprimands. Then your tongue will become a wild, unleashed tentacle, whipping out of control; it will be your instrument for expressing your silences, your refusals, your thirst for a life of dignity. You are the warrior’s hope and his mother as well, or have you forgotten this?”
Nabil is beside himself with fury. With a predatory glare his eyes dart arrows at his younger sister, who is forbidden to be in the hall. His breathing fills the house with an apocalyptic rumbling.
His mother is at her prayers. Veiled from head to foot, she is silently reciting verses from the Koran. She leans forward, straightens up, kneels and prostrates herself, facing east.
Nabil shakes with all his being. His mother finishes praying and puts the mat away in a recess. “All right, where is she?” thunders her son.
His mother turns away, unable to bear the burning gaze of her offspring. He grabs her by the shoulders and forces her to turn. His saliva splatters the old woman when he growls, “Where did she go?”
His mother quivers with rage and tears away the talons clutching her shoulders. “Cursed be the day that saw you born! How dare you raise your hand against your mother!”
Nabil works his jaws as he snarls, “I’ll bet she’s gone and taken part in that women’s protest march.”
His mother’s gaze wavers. Nabil immediately sees that he has hit the mark. He utters a wild yell and rushes down the stairs. The few children who are playing on the sidewalk clear off, frightened away by this human tornado.
Nabil looks all around him, trying to spot a friend with a car. He hails a young neighbor on a motorcycle, climbs on behind him, and orders him to drive to Martyrs’ Square.
About a hundred women, banners held aloft, are clustered together in a small group on the esplanade, under the mocking gaze of the idlers. Nabil dashes into the crowd, punching with his elbows as he pushes his way roughly through them, spitting and hitting out to clear a path. There is a buzzing in his head. It howls to him in a voice full of malice, “That demon, that bitch, she dared to disobey the law.” He brushes women aside, looking, looking. Every glance, every back turned to him, every gesture inflames his hatred. For a moment he imagines himself armed with a flamethrower, setting these cows, these whores, these witches on fire. His eyes glitter with murderous sparks. The voice in his head buzzes, “Sluts! sluts!” He knocks a woman down and tramples on her as he flails all around him.
A touch of panic rattles the march. Shouts ring out. “He’s crazy!” Nabil hears nothing. Coming upon a cluster of demonstrators he sees her! There she is, standing in front of him, wrapped in that skin he can’t stand. She sees him coming. She waits for him … without wavering … without drawing back.…
“She’s sneering at you,” the voice ululates. “She’s taunting you, she’s challenging you, the bitch!”
On her lightly made-up face there is a smile, a sardonic smile that has always rubbed him raw. He thrusts his hand into his jacket. His fist closes around a knife. Bitch! Whore! He strikes—just under the left breast, there! where the soul of perversity lurks. Then in the left kidney. Next a thrust to the stomach, at the height of the navel. Each stab is like the release of an electric charge. His sister’s blood spurts out. Smoking-hot red spots splash onto his wrist. In his head the murmuring of the voice mounts until it reaches an unbearable intensity. He is now quite mad.
The day wanes, the twilight sun flickering like a dim lamp placed in a room where the dead are laid out. Night falls as if the sun were putting on mourning for love betrayed. Shortly the moon will insinuate its eye like a hole punctured in the faceless sky. The rain is weeping on the city. * Yamina doesn’t notice it. She is floating in a universe shrouded in fog, a glacial, echoless place. She is already wandering in some parallel world. A voice calls out to her. Is it someone trying to attract her attention? Or is she only talking to herself. She does not know.
The place makes a turn and becomes a dark river. Yamina is a pebble, a bit of wreckage, a suicidal wave. She is a path wandering through a graveyard, a cobblestone humping up in the roadbed like a fossilized bruise, a bend in the road surprised and trapped by a dead end, and she is the crowd turned to stone as it watches her die.
Die? Is living all she ever did? Did she ever kiss the mouth of one she loved, did she ever shiver under a loving caress, or weep the orgasm of a body set free, of a body that shouts for joy?
In her death throes she returns to a yesterday rendered phantasmal like an illusion. A woman … to be a woman … to be nothing, nothing but a woman … To be of no account … deprived of hope … To be nothing but a bundle of sour wounds, blackened by the fates. Cursed be yesterday, a wretched sleepwalker lurching about in the infinite night.
Her mouth fills with blood, a blood that intoxicates her. She no longer recognizes her brother. She no longer even remembers him. Is it because he has disowned her?
She drops to her knees, the upper part of her body sways, she falls. Her face crashes against the roadway, her gaze fixed on something not there.
She is no longer anything, only a virgin who has just flickered out like a candle in a room where the dead are laid out. * She has flickered out like the day, at that hour when the sun crucifies itself on the shirttail of the horizon.
* “La pluie pleut sur la ville.” Cf. Paul Verlaine, “Il pleut dans mon coeur / comme il pleut sur la ville …” (Trans.).
* Play on cierge and vierge (Trans.).
DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS received the Grandmaster Award of the Mystery Writers of America in 1985. Her early novels and short stories held close to her Midwestern roots, but after A Gentle Murderer was published in 1951, New York became the scene of her fiction. The author of twenty novels and twenty-four short stories, Mrs. Davis has been nominated for the Edgar award seven times and is a member of the Adams Round Table.
Miles to Go
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
L aura set her weekend bag, her purse, and the gifts of chocolate creams—one for her aunt Mattie and one for her father-in-law—by the hall door. She tucked a scarf into the pocket of her reversible where it hung on a hall tree and went to find her husband. You could smell the paint throughout the apartment, and God knows, the whole apartment needed painting. It was in anticipation of a financial gift from her aunt Mattie that they decided to go ahead with the paint job now. Tim wanted to see how much he could do himself while she was away.
The paint bucket gave a perilous shudder as he came down the ladder. Much better for her nerves, Laura thought, that she was getting out of the house. Tim stooped low and Laura stood on tiptoe to kiss him. He was a tall man and she had to stretch to make five feet two. They were both crowding middle age, married for almost twenty years. No children. Alas! both of them always added. Tim worked variously in the entertainment field, a magician who built his own illusions, a folk singer who improvised modern metaphors on old legends. He made most
of his living in summer camps. He was what those with scorn for the race—or so much pride in it they could not abide mere affinity—called a professional Irishman. Laura was a lay teacher of English and music at a convent school just up the Hudson River from New York. The Mallorys owned the apartment on the Upper West Side, partnered to be sure with Chemical Bank. Large and high-ceilinged, it was full of books, the tools of Tim’s trades, and quite a number of things having nothing to do with modern employment, such as a spinning wheel, a loom, and a butter churn streaming now with ivy. Laura would be driving home from Vermont with the grandfather clock that had been in her family for more than a hundred years. It was a trip she cherished. She loved to drive. Tim was barely tolerant of her Honda, a 1993 Accord LX coupe, feeling it was built for Japanese midgets. He liked to say that if they had put the front seat in backward, and he lowered the back of the rear seat so that he could extend his legs into the trunk, it would just about fit him. Otherwise that convenience was great for a Christmas tree or, in the present circumstances, for the grandfather clock.
“You have the map and a flashlight,” Tim started his usual rundown. “Take the cellular phone. I’ll only get it all paint if you leave it here.”
“I don’t need it, Tim. Aunt Mattie would say it’s an affectation.”
“So is a grandfather clock.”
“Tim …”
“Okay, okay. Just drive carefully. It’s a car, not a palomino pony you’re driving. If it starts to rain skip the hospital. You can call them when you get to your aunt’s. And call me when you get there. Promise?”
“On my palomino,” she said.
Women on the Case Page 17
