The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry

by Assia Djebar

  “My mother cried at my wedding. Just her, not me. Fortunately, I had my son one year later and then my two daughters.”

  Tounsia gets up and heads for the little house; I think someone has called her name.

  In the evening’s silence, Yacouth breaks into a shrill lament that trembles toward the end, making me feel cold.

  I stay at Camp-Fougères for eight days. I enter little by little into the Berber chronicle of eight families who transplanted themselves, over the course of a few years, from Great Kabylia to this Cévennes village. Most of Tounsia’s anecdotes come alive with colors when her friends come to visit her on those long summer afternoons, draping their memories of the past twenty years in nostalgia.

  One time she exclaims, “Would you like to hear the most beautiful story?”

  “You are my Scheherazade of the Cévennes,” I reply.

  Yacouth has rushed up and is now huddled up on the bench. Someone brings the tea tray. Children gather around. It is four o’clock on a summer’s day. It could just as well be the middle of a black night.

  “Hear the story of Khadidja!” And, since she who is evoked is absent, Tounsia adds, in Arabic, the formula to ward off evil.

  “Her husband came one or two years after we did. He worked for a short while in the mines, then started up a little grocery store. He had left his mother, plus his wife, Khadidja, and their three daughters back in the village. He stayed here for ten years, twelve years, without going back. He sent them what they needed. He never went on vacation. And he was silent and serious too!”

  Yacouth interrupts the storyteller to make a clarification. Her face glowing, Tounsia resumes telling the story, transported entirely by the pleasure of the tale. “But, back in the village, Khadidja was worried. What if her husband were to take another wife while in exile? She prayed, begged her stepmother to watch over her daughters, at least at first, while she visited her husband! The stepmother remained unswayed; certainly she would need her stepdaughter’s strength to work the fields! Khadidja waited patiently until the hand of her eldest daughter, a teenager, was asked for in marriage.

  “She married her off. The other two grew up. She came back to see the matron again. ‘Give me two years. Just two years,’ she pleaded, ‘and I will bring your son back to you. I’ll bring him with me, or I will come back alone!’ And she made a vow. The old woman let herself be convinced. Khadidja could go. She arrived in Camp-Fougères in 1961, I believe . . .” With this, there is an exchange between the mother and the daughter to verify the date.

  “Yes,” she confirms. “My mother remembers that it was the last year of the Algerian war . . . Khadidja, newly arrived among us, was pregnant within a year. She had a fourth daughter. What a miracle!”

  And Tounsia lets out a hearty burst of laughter, stirring up the nighttime vapors that have just begun to settle.

  “Yes, a miracle. They say that God sometimes loves those who are exiled, like us. Khadidja, who was almost forty years old and nursing, managed to convince her husband to . . . yes, to come back home! It’s true that it was the time of independence back home, and so of hope. There were waves of people coming back!”

  Now, Yacouth slips into the interstices of the story by way of a word, an injunction, a sigh—words that are sharp and brief, or fluid.

  “Yes, yes,” Tounsia reassures her, laughing. “I’m going to tell her that; I forget nothing!”

  And she laughs. She laughs a long time.

  “And so they return as three, the couple and the baby. And we, the women here kissing them good-bye, could already hear the old woman in Kabylia ululating in welcome! Most definitely!

  “And the funny thing is what happened to Khadidja when she came to Algiers, her baby in her arms. She went first to see her married daughter, who had settled in a suburb of Algiers. The latter was in despair because she hadn’t gotten pregnant yet.

  “And so she pleaded, ‘Mother, give me the baby! She’s my sister. I will raise her like she’s my daughter. And I’m certain that she will bring me luck for my future pregnancies. I beg you, Mother!’

  “She invoked the Prophet and many of his saints. Khadidja let herself be convinced; she left the baby in Algiers and went back to the village with her husband.”

  “The story has a good ending!” I say.

  “No,” Tounsia chortles, “I’m not done yet! Sixteen years later, what happens? We had given my son the address of these friends—nothing unusual—when his barracks were in Algiers. For his first leave, he went there, to some public housing in the heights. A beautiful young girl opened the door for him, the very one that had been born in Camp-Fougères and thanks to whom her father came back to the country. The girl who had been raised by her sister!”

  And, after a pause, Tounsia tenderly admits, “My son fell in love with her! And then she was engaged to my eldest son!”

  There is silence, and then she adds, “Tomorrow when you leave, I’ll give you her address. Say hello to her for us! No, this summer, I’m staying here at home. I’m not going back!”

  MOTHER AND DAUGHTER—3

  Classes are starting up again at the university. It will be my last year teaching, though I don’t know it at the time.

  It’s a wet autumn. My black slicker, my brick-colored cap. The rains stop in the middle of November, but not the wind. The days grow shorter. I remember having crossed the villages of the Sahel this time of the year in a bus or with a couple of friends in their little car . . . I also remember two or three female students that I invited to the Café des Facultés. The youngest one had been looking around with the eyes of a hunted cat. She seemed pretty surprised that a professor was talking with her students about something other than class or the world of academia. One told me about her childhood in an Aurès hamlet, and the other about her plans for the future.

  But Ourdia didn’t talk about herself. She excused herself and went away. “Afraid of her family!” her classmate said. Then she added, “Last year, her father, a retired man who had come from his village in Great Kabylia, would walk with her all the way to the doors of the amphitheater. And would wait for her at the exit.”

  Winter’s clear light sets in. Every evening, the skies are clouded with flocks of migrating birds. The sharp brightness of the air. Again, I’m haunting the city that is sculpted like this, sparkling at noon.

  Just before the end of the semester, a student comes up to me. We are on a footpath in the middle of a boulevard. In a parched voice she asks, “Ourdia? Do you remember Ourdia?”

  “Of course!”

  “She died the day before yesterday. An accident. Fell from the terrace of her house in the Casbah.” Her voice is jolted by a hiccup. “Today they’re burying her in their mountain village.”

  There’s a second hiccup, more of a sob. The young girl turns away from me. A little farther off, she breaks into a run to cross the street.

  One month later, the truth, which runs underground from secret meeting to secret meeting. No proof, only a certainty first among the old women, but they will say nothing; then among their daughters, among their surrounding nieces who do talk, who try to think of what to do. Justice? What justice?

  One month later, the truth.

  Ourdia hasn’t been coming to the Café des Facultés with me anymore, nor with her friends. One single time, it seems, she agreed to sit there with a boy who had invited her. Who certainly devoured her with his eyes during every class. She hadn’t talked, only listened to him. Then murmured, having hastily finished her Coke, “No, I’m going. I can’t!”

  In this public place she was recognized by a cousin or a neighbor. The rumor made its way to her father, and for days, he would grumble, “Disgraced! I have been disgraced!” He decided on the punishment: no more school for Ourdia. He’d shut her in. Wall her in with hyperbolic suspicions. Every night he’d talk about “death sentences” with his wife, a woman who was silent, fearful, callous. Reminded her of her faults—how she hadn’t given him a son, not a single ma
le to avenge the honor of the venerable, betrayed father today.

  “Disgraced!” The father’s anthem enveloped her every night, buzzed around her as she lay sleepless. From then on, she would be the prisoner’s guardian. So that the father’s honor and the family name would be restored!

  After this, Ourdia obtained permission to go out on the terrace every night. The walls of the old house had suffered from the last earthquake of the past autumn. A neighboring home a little lower down had caved in; the inhabitants had been moved, but the ruins hadn’t been swept away.

  The day had just faded away as Ourdia, standing in the shadows, contemplated the basin of the harbor, the blackened sea, the reflections of the boats idling on the horizon. A landscape that shivered, half frozen. The young girl must have dreamed, in spite of herself, of going away. But where?

  At bedtime on the eighth day, Ourdia stood at the angle of the terrace railing, the figure of a prow. The silent, fearful, calloused mother. Ingenious, too. She slipped right by. In a flash, breathing heavily, she pushed her daughter over, threw her into the abyss—actually, into the shambles of the neighboring house, which was already destroyed.

  The investigation concluded, “Unfortunately, the railing of the terrace’s far corner was too loose.”

  The story, woven from mouth to mouth in the circle of the new tellers, hemmed me in, tore me apart, urged me away.

  Winter vacation in this city. “The city of tempests,” they called it once. Today, the city of murders.

  Tomorrow I’m buying a return ticket. Return?

  Non-return returns.

  —Venice, January 1996

  Burning

  At the time, the news of the day would come to me in a sheath of soot. I’d get it from the radio or the newspaper, though usually from a familiar voice over the phone that would disarm me at dawn or sometimes reach me just before nightfall. News of death: a friend or a woman I had esteemed or admired, or an old professor I’d fallen out of touch with had been assassinated. Or the death of someone I didn’t know—a student, a unionist, or someone who’d been a resistance fighter in the recent war. A death that had dropped in someplace I’d passed through the day before, at a market I go to every day. A death so close it would spurt me with its hideous details, its inconceivable violence. At the time . . .

  Why am I taking up my pen, bringing it back? Maybe I’ve abandoned all hopes of survival; maybe I’ve grown weary of talking about it, of telling. But what does it mean to write—and stealthily and secretly, in a corner, like an insane person or a recluse muttering to herself? To write for a time when everything of these places is destroyed and nothing remains, of me at least, except these scribblings in an abandoned notebook whose author, in her turn, will be . . .

  When my time comes, will I be scared? Will they find out that, like a hundred or so others in this putrid city, I’ve changed my neighborhood, my appearance, that I’ve varied my style of dress, my name, my way of wearing my glasses, of inflecting my voice, modifying even my accent, the rhythm of my dialect? Sometimes I decide to make myself old (now almost forty, I know that even last year I still looked thirty, especially since I started living—blissfully—on my own). Just before I leave my apartment, I check my image in the entryway mirror and sigh, “Ah, yes. At forty, how easy it is to look fifty or simply ageless; to be a woman whose ordinariness makes her invisible . . . with bad hair, bad shoes, wearing dull colors, with a shapeless skirt, a shopping basket in her arms. A busy housewife.”

  Now I walk down the street slowly, almost mechanically. I, who used to rush ahead or suddenly stop in an esplanade to admire the panorama, the facades, the immense bay. And I’d throw my head back to slake myself with the blue of the sky. I couldn’t get enough of it, the feeling of the light enveloping me. I’d soar, I’d swim in the azure. So recently! No, it’s not fear. I simply feel diminished. There have been attacks in the city for six months now, and when I want to go out, I make myself into an anonymous passerby. I pull my hair back into a braid, walk with abrupt steps, and fix my gaze determinedly ahead of me. Who would recognize me? Who out here would be able to detect my former insolence? I go on, I’m alive, I’m calm. I keep my joy muzzled within. Who out here is it that I’m defying? What murderer?

  Before long, I’m sitting in a public square. I take out some knitting needles and even put a grandmotherly shawl on my shoulders. I knit, and I’m sure I look like an industrious ant, small and hunched up. Soon my fingers are coming and going somewhat mechanically (I picked up the technique as a teenager, during my years at boarding school), and I start to daydream, my heart heavy.

  Just three years ago, some of my friends and colleagues were starting to get excited about the new liberal trends in politics. They were teachers and journalists, plus some researchers and doctors. I’d listen to them indulgently. But I was in the early stages of a senseless passion, and was, in truth, distracted.

  Continuing to knit, I tell myself that everything in me then was vacillating, thickening, roiling. Here in this public square, I smile. There’s a bearded man on the bench across from me, and two women in black chadors are passing by, casting dubious glances at my spotless woolen shawl. Nonetheless, I dive into the murky waters I was immersed in precisely three years ago. It was an October day, like today.

  That autumn morning I said to myself, “Let’s see, I’ve just turned thirty-six, but my heart beats wildly at almost every little thing, like when I was eighteen. I’m falling in love. Falling? No, flying!” And I laughed.

  Knitting on my bench, I smile. The women in chadors have moved off, the bearded man—bearded and fat—is still scrutinizing me. What do I care? On this day in late 1993, nobody recognizes me in this disguise while I sit in the sun and relive this fever of mine from two years ago . . . Wait, was it two years ago?

  Suddenly I stand and put my needles away in my bag. I fold my shawl and put my glasses back on. At the same deliberate pace, I set out again for the street, then up to the heights where my building—my refuge—stands.

  I’m filled with a sense of haste, a kind of tingling of pleasure. I’ve just decided: “I should write about how I felt the autumn before last. I’ll write about it to relive it, to think about it all alone, at my leisure. Nawal, my best friend, will be there. I’ll tell her: ‘Listen. Let me talk to you, tell you! I couldn’t at the time. I didn’t tell you anything. I wasn’t hiding or being secretive. It just seemed that talking about it while I was living it would have diminished the intensity or would have altered it, I don’t know. But now it’s different. Listen, let me tell you about it, down to the last detail!’”

  She’d be patient, she’d smile. She’d wait whenever I fell silent, she . . . I’m already talking about her in the conditional. Six months ago, her body was blasted apart by a bomb in her car. I was already in hiding by then. Though I knew about the funeral that was two days afterward, I couldn’t go. “Luckily for you,” a friend of mine told me on the phone. “Nobody could see her body, not even her face. They had picked her up in several pieces!”

  I walk with short steps. I panic, stop, and look back conspicuously. What if the bearded man were following me, to see where I was going, then immediately informing his acolytes? Was that how they got Nawal?

  There’s no one behind me. And nobody can guarantee that it was really Nawal who was blasted apart. Afterward, this shattered body would haunt me when I’d wake up in the morning, and I was inhabited with doubts. And then, one morning at dawn I was assailed by the idea, raw and ruthless, tormenting me with savage eyes: “Since the body gathered up was all in little pieces, who can be sure that Nawal is dead? No. It was one of her friends, whom she’d loaned her car to that day, and Nawal has simply gone away!”

  Since then, I’ve been convincing myself of this. And if she hasn’t come forward to disprove the false news of her death, it’s because she’s under top security now!

  Since then, I’ve been sleeping better.

  Nawal will come back. She’ll listen
to me. She’ll smile at my latest “fervor.” Nawal, the romantic, would say “passion.” Or maybe, in her teasing way, she’d throw out the expression “your little crush.” I can hear her roguish laugh. When I go back to my room, I’m sure to find her . . . or her ghost. I’ll tell her . . .

  But I’m alone, and Nawal . . . she won’t come. Oh, such liveliness and curiosity—so recently!—she’d understand me!

  Almost immediately after I’ve shut the door, I’m out of these old rags and down to my underwear. I settle in and serve myself an iced tea. I sit down at my table and write. I want to write, both for Nawal and for myself, about my “passion,” let’s say, this commotion of mine from two years ago . . .

  I relive that fever here in this frozen city. I put an Archie Shepp record on low, and soon the tenor sax expands and deepens within me. I write. Why? What’s the use? One day, I’ll be in a public square or in the supermarket and they’ll recognize me. The next day, I’ll be in front of my building, about to leave (for I don’t let a single day pass without going out for the sun, for the spring, wanting to hear my own thoughts, looking like an anonymous old woman, but outside!), and they’ll annihilate me. Yes, I write. And at least this trace of history will live on in this notebook that will stay behind. I’ll store it somewhere.

  I won’t be here ten years from now, that’s for sure. The city, now in tumult, at a lethal roil, will have simmered down, will have been relieved of its demons: they’ll have dissipated at last. Some will say that the city has “regenerated.” Let them think so. The sun and the spring will glitter with the same immutable radiance.

  I won’t be here anymore. I’ll be in hiding, in exile, or destroyed once and for all, dispelled like a dream! These few pages of a love story will resurface, maybe under the eyes of a friend, a neighbor, of a young stranger who will come to clean up the little apartment. She’ll happen to open a drawer, or a trunk that had long been padlocked . . . My final lines, my story.