by Assia Djebar
We were told that it occurred one hour after that. At one in the afternoon or a little bit later.
My father was in his room, conscious. The professor’s examination had eased his mind. Standing in front of the window, Maman smiled. She was talking to Madame Darmon, who was sitting on the other side of the room. She had just reassured her that she had told us and that we, the sister and the little girl, would be coming very soon. We would all be reunited in one or two hours.
My father participated in the conversation, though he was very pale and apprehensive about the upcoming operation.
At which point they came in. A group of doctors. New ones? Strangers, in any case. They, the three, were all wearing white shirts.
One remained standing next to the door. The second questioned the patient in a rough voice: “Are you the designated . . . ?”
My mother interrupted, “I’m his wife! What do you want?”
Maman didn’t have the opportunity to continue.
The third, the one in the front, pulled out a gun from beneath his shirt. While the others blocked the exit, he sedately emptied his gun on the patient. The second, holding a revolver, aimed for Maman’s standing form, which then crumpled.
Her eyes wide, Madame Darmon cried and stood up. The first hesitated, went to shoot her, but his bullet chamber was empty. He took a step back.
“Don’t move, lady!”
The fake doctors, the murderers, all backed out of the room.
Commotion and silence outside in the corridor as the armed men started to run.
The scene took place in slow motion, just before Maman’s body was gunned down . . .
Then, poor Madame Darmon said, “Your maman wasn’t dead, no! They put her on a stretcher and immediately took her to the biggest hospital. With Abbas it was simpler, alas; the sheets of his bed were his shroud.”
Madame Darmon continued, with tears in her eyes, “Poor Habiba! Less than one hour later, because of her damaged liver, she breathed her last! I was with her in the ambulance!”
The scene in slow motion. And mute.
It’s strange, while I inscribe this for someone who is totally removed from this, dear Olivia, the sounds come back, the dialogues, the uproar, and sometimes the sobs, the same as the infinite, inaudible lament of the survivors.
My maternal aunt passed away the day before yesterday, Olivia, a Thursday night. She was buried yesterday and had the fortune of being carried to the nearby mosque just before the public prayer at one in the afternoon. All of the people that she knew in her neighborhood prostrated themselves during the service, thinking of her. And so she has died a natural death in the company of her own.
Tomorrow will be the third day of mourning. I will stand at her grave amid her friends and her friends’ children. Two days later I will leave the city, Olivia.
The day they bury Khalti (I pronounce this name, tears welling up in my voice), I’m told that, not far from our neighborhood, two or three teenagers fired at an elderly university professor at point-blank range from an old car that then took off for the Petit Lac neighborhood; they fired at the professor when he was leaving his house, with one of his grandchildren at his side. A great master who formed other great masters in sociology, in both Arabic and in French.
He knew that he was in danger and was making preparations to go. He had accepted an offer from a French university to come and teach as an assistant professor.
The master was taking his time because it was going to cost him (he hadn’t budged from his city since the 1960s). He was only waiting for his French visa.
The murderers shot him just before he was going to get it. The professor—gunned down! I heard about it at the cemetery. I heard about the wave of sorrow that washed over the world of students and young colleagues.
The body of the assassinated master was taken to the hospital, then to the morgue.
The rest, I know the rest. Let me hear nothing more about what’s going on now in this city. Hide the hate from me—the insanity, the victims!
In the hospital’s corridor, I see a child, a little girl or a boy, who learns that the master—his father or grandfather—has died. The child screams: “Assassins! You’ve killed him!”
Let me hear nothing more. Mma—Khalti—passed on peacefully. In the street just over, death, with its mouth open, bared its fangs.
And the child in the corridor screams. Doesn’t stop. I’m leaving tomorrow or the day after. Already, I can no longer hear the cries, nor the songs. My memory has been stopped up, dulled.
I’m leaving because I want to see nothing more, Olivia. I want to say nothing more—just write. Write Oran in a trough, in a mute tongue, finally reduced to silence.
Write Oran, my dead language.
—Paris, August 1996
Non-return Returns
Comings and goings, returns, round trips, slow returns. Count them in a fit of energy or discount them as circles of melancholy. Going back to the homeland, to the earth, to my father’s hearth.
Established again, immersed again, rooted again. And again the desire for departure gnawing at me. At the time, I was tormented every day by a single, slight obsession of sun, a longing to cross the threshold, to pass through the door, to slip out the tiniest opening. Until then, my body swallowed in the shadows, stiffened on a mattress on the floor in some nook or waiting in a dark corridor. Then the light summoning—a beam from afar, maybe a whisper: Go out, out, out!
With bare feet or already dressed and with shoes on, my hair sometimes damp, a fruit in my hand, going out. There, an insidious weaving—the risk of suffocation, of semidarkness, of being holed up. The desire: to go out, out.
For four years—four years!—the streets weren’t entirely welcoming! At twilight they would turn me out, send me home. I would have stayed one or two hours more, sitting on the stairs, watching the sky change with the sunset and the night abruptly taking possession of the entire city.
I would have contemplated the tide in abeyance, drinking it in with my eyes before deciding to retreat slowly back to the empty house.
Inevitably, the white veiled forms of the city’s women would suddenly flutter in the dust; and they, sad doves, would disappear. Among the clusters of children playing on the banisters just next to the dead-end alleys, little ten-year-old girls would come with the babies they had been carrying so long on their hips. Inevitably, what remained outside would be the jurisdiction of lazy men, of old grumblers and jokers, of little boys. The last women to pass, frightened, would hurry, to disperse with the night.
From then on, the male city would resound; the mothers’ final scoldings could be heard coming from the wings, from behind closed doors that made their voices sound more shrill, or cascading from up above over the railings of the balconies.
So the streets would hunt me, and if I resisted, if I persisted, it would no longer be the movement of the shadows that I observed, but the sharpness of twinkling, lingering gazes that I would want to forget. “Their” looks.
After being so pressed, then retreating, the desire to leave—angry or, on the contrary, joyous—would be awakened in me, as soon as the following morning. To leave it all behind, to go before any notion of returning could present itself. To get a return ticket, of course, just in case and to save some money.
Going away would return me to myself. Far away, a foreigner at last—the fruits and the pulp of being foreign, a foreigner even to my memories and my future. Vacant, nascent. To leave!
On this earth of dust and abyss—an abyss behind every look—mothers, our Demeters, no longer weep for their daughters, not if they are abducted or held captive. They are hardly there for them at all. Mothers do not cling to their daughters, nor push them forward when, from adolescence on, they hesitate to go forth. Mothers, with their regular ululations (stridence and drawn-out pain), mostly encourage their sons—one minute to war, the next to nuptials.
Mothers, at least on this southern shore—which isn’t azure blue, but blacken
ed blue or sullied white—every mother searches for a defense, for a rampart in the face of her eldest daughter’s silhouette (she who is sometimes only fifteen or sixteen years her junior . . .) or of the youngest one impatiently stamping her foot. It is so rare that the mother lets herself be angered by this flicker of movement! She usually remains quiet, builds up a wall between herself and this menace of a juvenile body that doesn’t stay put behind the closed blinds; often, so often, it makes the mother sullen . . .
Sometimes she is forty years old, still bearing children, still—as always—in a state of submission, of muteness, of deep withering, while her favorite daughter—her third or fourth—turns around and falls in love, tottering on the brink of a vow, of a smile . . . or already comes out every dawn, disheveled from the embraces of the bridal chamber . . . The sullen mother, yes. Doubly burdened.
Sometimes the slightest bad mood in her daughter will frighten the mother; she freezes, then gets up, arms extended, face convulsive, opening her mouth up wide, shrieking in silence, advances, palms out front, circle of lips that are open, but stricken, frozen.
Alarm? No, horror.
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER—1
I was saying, “rooted again”? I watch my legs as they slide into sturdy denim or, when I’m alone, when they’re totally naked under my African toga. So are these my roots? My feet move, come and go. They do a few dance steps in front of the mirror, become feverish, their rhythm accelerating so I can cross the threshold—all thresholds. I must go out. I go out. Into this keeling city. Onto the swaying streets. Into this onslaught of catastrophe, all the way, to the end, so close, so far . . .
I hurry down a slope, stroll with my nose in the air. The sky is hard and pure, like a crown. I am alone in the crowd. Without a veil and, I believe, invisible. As I walk, I grow more confident. They have eyes—the boys, the fathers, the little old men. They are blind. I am a shadow.
I move my body, slide it, push it forward imperceptibly. It will take flight, come off of the ground. I float outside. Pure intoxication, because I’m still outside. The sun is pitching forward. All of a sudden I feel exhausted, and I ask myself how I’m going to get back up to where I live, to the top of the hill.
A taxi might have been available an hour ago. The crowds of workers at the bus stop wouldn’t have been so thick.
I call my mother. What’s the use of acting liberated? Of the two of us, she’s actually the one—the mother—who’s learned how to drive. I begin, “It’s impossible to find a taxi. Can you come?”
“I’m on my way!”
She’ll take the car, drive along the two main roads. She’ll be here in twenty minutes, will pull up in front of the terrace at the café by the Boulevard de la Marine.
She honks the horn. I’ve finished and paid for my coffee. I jump up and get in next to her.
The way back up will take longer. Everybody leaves the office at the same time, and the buses, chock-full, block the intersections. The mother laughs at how useful she is.
“You’re lucky to have me as your chauffeur!”
“What if we make a detour, to the west, to the first fishing village? There will be crates of red mullet on the wharf!”
Two women at large. Nobody would think, “mother and daughter.” The mother, around fifty, is blonde, wearing sunglasses (for ten years, ever since she’s been “officially” going out without a veil, she, the blonde, has known how to do it all—drive, do the shopping, handle bureaucratic affairs, go to the post office, pay the bills). And the daughter, thirty years old, is a professor whose lessons are prepared just in time—or sometimes (not always) improvised—for her two days of classes, the second day in a crowded amphitheater. For the remainder of the week, she forgets the students and the meetings with colleagues and saunters along the streets, up and down the staircases, wandering in the markets, making up her itinerary as she goes.
“What if you got married again?”
A truck driver insults the over-cheerful mother, and the daughter bursts out laughing.
“You know very well that I want to go away again. I mean, I long for it, I’ve been planning for it.”
“To go away in order to come back!” the mother amends.
The mother shrugs her shoulders. They have pulled up in front of the house.
“I’m getting out here!” the daughter says. “I’m going to talk with Father in his study for an hour or so. Go ahead and eat dinner without me. I’m going to go back to my place.”
Algiers at night. Ten years have slipped by since the recent independence.
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER—2
Even though Yacouth’s name is Arabic (Yacinthe means “precious stone”), she has kept her gold- and purple-colored Kabyle dresses and her Berber. As she sailed from Algiers to Marseille for the first time in 1946, it’s in this language that she sighed, “Oh Lord.” As the white city grew irreversibly distant, she passionately exclaimed, “May I never see my homeland again, ever!”
Clinging to this traveler’s skirts was a little six-year-old girl, Tounsia. The following dawn, her eyes devoured the inscriptions on the hulls of the boats in Marseille. She carefully uttered a prayer that paralleled her mother’s: “One day, oh Lord, make it so that I can decipher these designs! I will read!”
And she would. For the time being, Yacouth and little Tounsia followed Rosa, a French woman who organized this venture, down the gangway. Married to a Kayble man who had emigrated to La Grand-Combe, Rosa agreed to bring her first son to Algeria, near Akbou, so that he could be circumcised among members of his father’s tribe. That was when she persuaded Yacouth to muster up the courage to meet her husband in the Cévennes, where he was working as a miner.
Thirty years later, Yacouth relives the departure for me.
“Yes. ‘May I never see my country again.’ As a migrant, that was my only prayer. I had been so unhappy in my village when, recently orphaned, my brothers had handed me over into doomed marriages—twice! My third husband, an honest man, had to leave the country in 1940. Thanks to Rosa, I took an open coach to Algiers, holding my daughter by the hand. Then this boat. I was thirty-six years old.”
She crosses her tattooed hands over her knees. Her dress, a blend of gold and purple, is almost identical to the one she was wearing on the day she left in 1946. She freezes for a family photo at Camp-Fougères. It’s not far at all from La Grand-Combe’s mines, which are just about to close. The region will empty itself inexorably of the memory of Italian, Spanish, and Maghrebian miners.
Jovial Tounsia, who’s my age, welcomes me and wants to talk.
“‘Tounsia.’ Have I told you why I keep my foreign name?”
I remain silent, inquiring merely with a look, a smile, or a small gesture.
“My father was working in the mines. He got the unexpected news that I had been born far off in the village. He was coming out of the pits when they gave him the telegram. He wanted to celebrate in a bistro with his friends.” She shrugs her shoulders. I smile.
“He and all of his friends made their toasts, and he shouted out in the café, ‘It’s a girl! It’s a girl!’ I think he was proud. Amar the Tunisian once told him, ‘I have a daughter back home. A tounsia.’ And so he decided to call me, his daughter in Kabylia ‘Tounsia’! ‘She’s not Tunisian,’ he said, ‘but that’s what they’ll call her!’”
They all accompanied the father to the post office, where he sent the telegram with the order: “Give my daughter the name ‘Tounsia!’”
Silence. Yacouth sits facing the two of us. Behind her are hedgerows and flowerbeds. For the entire time that Tounsia is telling the story, in French, her mother stares at the speaker’s face, lips, and hands. Tounsia is now a mother herself, and her first son has decided to return to Algeria this summer for military service.
“All of a sudden, this summer, I didn’t want to go back to my country! Ever since I’ve been working, for vacations I leave the children with my mother, and fifteen summers in a row—yes, fifteen!—in August
or July, I would rush back to the village. But everything will change here at Camp-Fougères. A lot of the tunnels are shutting down, and the train station will close. The younger ones are leaving for Alès. But this time I told myself, ‘I want to visit and revisit the place where I grew up. Here!’”
She pauses. Yacouth takes her turn—a long sentence that meanders as it unravels, growing breathless, and then quieter and more unsteady at the end.
“Translate her Berber for me,” I ask softly.
“Why is she bringing all of that up?” the daughter murmurs guardedly.
Tounsia is quiet. With its ravines of vertical lines, Yacouth’s face is slightly obscured and motionless. The green of her eyes twinkles. And Tounsia’s quiet, as if the older woman’s request had stung her skin, severed her strength. She pulls herself out of her thoughts.
“Of course she would like me to tell you about our troubles. In the beginning, they’d housed all three of us in the shacks that had just been vacated by the German prisoners of war. Sometimes, during storms, the roof would fly off. Next to us, there was a Sicilian family. You see, it was such a vast yard back there; there were at least ten of those wooden shacks!”
She makes a gesture, then starts off again: “How I loved school when I was a little girl! Beginning in the first year I took French.” She pauses, shivers. “Since you’ll be here for a few more days, I’ll tell you about that! Why was it that one day, even though I was doing well in school, my father made a vow by God and his Prophet? Because of his promise, I had to stop going to school when I was fourteen! I was married six months later.”
And Tounsia’s quiet. Yacouth’s eyes are still on me, watching me as I wait.
