by Assia Djebar
“Liar!” I replied. “These are your weapons you use on all the ladies!” I smiled at him.
“But no,” he insisted, using the informal, which comes quickly in spoken Arabic. “You are the first I’ve approached in my mother’s language.”
In turn, I protested in Arabic, “I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Bi’ Allah!” he swore, suddenly serious.
I pulled away my hand. I renewed my distance, and in formal French I said, “As if you were Muslim!”
“By birth,” he retorted. “You know very well, Lalla Isma, that in our times, it’s an irreversible condition, alas, in the eyes of the inquisitors who now swarm our countries!”
“You’ve clearly lapsed,” I concluded lightly, “but not me!”
We went our separate ways. I left quickly, not wanting to tell him that each night I would go back to my empty home—or, to be more precise, the conjugal household!
For Ali had left three days after the Somalian had arrived. His grandmother was in critical condition, and he’d been called down to his village in the Beni Ourtilane. Seventy-five years old, she’d been solid until then and had raised him on her own when he’d lost his mother and father in the war.
I used to see Lalla Salma once a year when Ali and I would visit, usually in the summer or the season of the hot springs. I was afraid of this robust woman of the mountains: her yellow eyes, her flaming red hair, her round and fresh, wrinkle-free face, and, especially, her exemplary piety. She’d worked all of her life behind her loom, five hours a day, almost to the end: up to the final month.
Her war pension and Ali’s contributions were enough for her, but even after she no longer needed to work, she kept at it for ten more years. “For God,” she’d say. She chose four or five young girls from the nearby villages to share her skill with, passing on to them her weaving techniques. Her workshop had stayed busy until just recently.
“She’s turned in for the night,” Ali informed me over the telephone. “She still manages to sit up to say her prayers. She talks to me every so often . . . I don’t leave her bedside. She’s suffering, but doesn’t say so.”
I’d call Ali every morning. I will not leave . . . What if she died? I will not leave. Lalla Salma needed only her son (her grandson, the only one). I wasn’t under the impression that she liked me. It seemed she was irritated with me for not having given Ali a descendant, but she’d never talked to me about it.
Maybe at first glance she knew that I would leave “her” Ali someday! One morning she’d watched from behind her loom as I was coming back from the rural hammam. (It’s true that the ancient Roman baths and the children I met there were all I cared about in the village.) I was laughing, my hair wet on my neck, and there was my “not very Muslim” way of sitting on my heels, of wearing boys’ pants, or sometimes a seroual, but an urban one that was too short. Without a hint of reproach, as if just making an observation, she once said to me, “You don’t stay in place, little one!” She paused, then resumed, “And, Isma, you won’t!”
Was it a judgment? I didn’t talk to Ali about it. I hadn’t gone back to the village for two years. What for? When we’d go up, it seemed as if I was disrupting old Salma and Ali’s private time.
Perhaps the distance between us, the fissure that I’d noticed starting then, began even before we met. Maybe with his parents’ death? He never talked about it. I had learned about the horror of their death almost by accident. One time, stretched out in my arms, he had described the two cadavers to me. The two bodies had been brought to Salma’s home at dawn. Two bodies that had been shot dead, and, it was said, both bore visible traces of torture. And there was (but this, a distant relative passing through the village had ventured one time) evidence that the young dead woman must have been raped. Their son, a child (Ali was six years old), had contemplated the remains in silence.
“Each one was wrapped in a black blanket, black with red stripes. Just the two heads coming out. My mother’s, her hair blotted with mud, her Kabyle headdress fallen . . . My father’s, a waxen mask with the eyes shut!”
He told me during our first year together, I believe. Back then, when he’d make love to me every night, it was with a clumsy violence.
One night I’d asked him about it cautiously: “Why this fever, in a moment that’s so tender?”
He’d been silent. Then, around an hour later—we were still in bed, and I was naked in his arms, as usual—he’d described what he, as a little boy of six (in the summer of 1960) had stared at in silence. Had not forgotten.
After that, he gradually became more tender as a lover. Several years running, our nights had been truly rich.
Nawal, I think it was around this time that we caught up with each other again. I introduced you to my husband, who was only five or six years my senior. You observed, “To me, he really seems much older than you.” I think you were intimidated by him.
“It’s that he’s suffered more than I have!” I answered.
I stopped talking to you about my marriage. Until I met the Somalian. You saw me with him at the radio station, and neither my animated face, nor my gaze—too earnest, perhaps—escaped you.
Once, it was just you and me out on the street, and you asked me bluntly, “And what about Ali and your love for him in all this?”
“This question . . .” I stammered. “Are you a vigilante? A censor?”
“No, but you’re like a sister to me! You know that. So what’s going on with Ali?”
“Ali,” I said, after a silence. “One year, two years. There’s nothing I can reproach him for! Nothing . . . He’s growing more distant. He works like crazy. Always at the hospital, always with his sick children!”
“That . . . I know that!”
“Nawal, every summer we go to his village in the mountains. They haven’t really adopted me up there, okay? What can I do about it?”
“It’s not the others I’m asking you about. I’m not worried about them. It’s Ali. You and Ali. He loves you. You know that, I’m sure of it!”
It was as if you were insisting, Nawal. And so heatedly!
Finally I said, maybe for myself most of all, “In the summer, when I think I’ll be able to get close to him again, in the mountains or wherever . . . Well, we don’t make love anymore! It’s because of his old mother. With Lalla Salma in the house, he gets chaste on me! I think it’s strange. And since then, my body’s grown unaccustomed to him.”
Do you remember? We were walking down a deserted alley in a nice part of town. We came to where I lived, and since Ali hadn’t come home yet, all the lights in the spacious house were off. You decided to stay for a second, and I served you some tea in the kitchen.
“Don’t ask me questions about the foreigner,” I said sharply. “I like him, yes, it’s only too obvious. I know. But there’s nothing between us. There won’t be anything.”
I had practically shouted this. Wordlessly, you got up and kissed me on my cheeks.
“If you felt—like I do—what’s brewing in this city, this country. It’s so much more serious. So much sadder! Please come to our meetings for the women’s association again. The committee’s planning on getting together next week.” You went on, “A woman in Ouargla was assaulted. Her ex-husband hatched the plot, and the Islamists were involved. Then her house was burned. And her son died inside!”
I was suddenly ashamed, and I promised to be more diligent about the association, to keep myself informed of the new dangers. I’d go the following week. I’d be among the first to march at the massive demonstration of women in support of democracy.
Along with two or three other leaders, Nawal, you improvised speeches to the applause of us all, to the jeers of square-shouldered teenagers in jackets who stood together in groups, scoffing at us.
As we passed by, one of them spit pointedly right next to me. Staring me in the eye, he muttered melodic-sounding curses.
That night I described the teenager who spat at me and the impressive pa
rade of sympathizers to Ali when he got home from the hospital. “We’ll win!” he’d proclaimed.
Then, he left for his village in the mountains. Lalla Salma died eight days later. It wasn’t Ali who told me, but a relative. “Buried just today,” she said. “Ali wants you to know that you won’t have enough time to come all this way. He’ll come back after the third day of mourning.”
“I want to talk to him, I . . .”
“He’s at the mosque. He’s got to take care of everything! He’ll call you tonight.”
But he didn’t. The next morning, there was another women’s demonstration. I was packing my bag at dawn (“If I have to, I’ll take a taxi for the five- or six-hour trip up to the village!”) when Ali called. “No, don’t come! In any case, it’s too late. We buried her yesterday. I’m coming back the day after tomorrow!”
But from whom, from what was I suddenly excluded? From her, the deceased? It had been that way for a long time. I finally understood this and Ali’s love for her. They had had their intense, exclusive connection, and this time he wanted me far away—far from Lalla Salma, far from death. He, the six-year-old child who had contemplated the other horror (the two mutilated bodies shot dead), wanted to say good-bye to her on his own. He’d always wanted to remain alone in his solitude with her—Lalla Salma, whom he alone had buried. Had he prayed in the little village mosque? I couldn’t ask him.
“If you insist, then come on the fortieth day of mourning!” he added abruptly, then hung up.
I went to the second women’s demonstration, which was like an open-air festival. Swarms of swifts, getting ready to migrate south, were teeming in the sky. We sang in the November sun. This time, there weren’t only women, but also intellectuals, students, families with children, and some opposition leaders who’d just reentered the country. We marched in an almost convivial disarray. The demonstration was as much for the Berber language, which was again under fire, as for the safeguard of working women, who were being attacked by hoodlums “in the name of religion” in small towns in both the North and the South.
Before hanging up, Ali had affirmed, perhaps a little sadly, “If you go to the demonstration, tell yourself that it’s just as important as if you had come here! Later, I promise you, we’ll come back here together!”
“I think about you, I’d have liked to have been with you,” I declared firmly.
Immediately, I thought, “Mine isn’t a wife’s companionship, but that of a friend, a sister, a cousin. Otherwise, I’d have already set out the day before, right away, even in the middle of the night!”
When I got back from the demonstration, it was the musician who called me at home.
“I was on the sidewalk, not far from the studio, when your crowd passed! Isma, come to my hotel, I beg you! We’ll have a nice dinner in the great big garden, and you can tell me about it!”
“Tomorrow morning, I promise. I don’t have any classes Monday. I’ll come to your fine hotel first thing!”
“As you like,” he conceded, melancholy.
He was probably bored. When night falls, the people passing through this city can only go around in circles. There’s no theatre open in this capital, no movies worth going to, no concert halls! Everything is closed, and people shut themselves up at home like criminals!
The next day, the Somalian was visibly moved as he greeted me at the hotel. We sat down for a moment in the park, and then I decided to go with him to the studio. “I’ll stay with you during the day and watch you work!”
“These are the last days,” he remarked. “I’ll be leaving soon!”
“You’re going to leave!” I said softly in the taxi. I don’t know how it happened, but our fingers were intertwined for the entire journey.
V
And two days later, Nawal, Ali came back. (I’m resuming my conversation with you. You’re so close to me, with your friendship, with your breath up close. Help me . . . help me to understand these harried days!)
He came into the house, and I kissed him silently. It looked like a thin veil of soot had passed over all his features. He went into our room. It was the afternoon. He took me by the hand. He led me toward the bed, a hard and wide mattress set directly on a thick rug.
I followed him and said nothing. I had closed off internally, but I remained attentive to his reserved, constrained gestures. His hand was hot. I stretched out on the bed beneath the white cover, watching him. He undressed slowly. It was as if it were the evening, and he’d just come back late or we had just finished long hours of work, each in our own rooms. As if it were midnight. But it was only three o’clock in the afternoon.
Stretching out in my light dress, I looked at him. “He really is coming back from the fringes of death,” I told myself, still closed off, not thinking of myself. I would embrace him. He seemed all silence. He got under the cover, between the sheets without smiling, with a gesture of the arm. Suddenly, I thought of our first time and of this same easy gesture of his arm against his naked hip. It was in this same bed, I think . . .
His hands touched my face, my neck, my chest. Without getting up, I undid my top buttons. His palms, almost burning, sought my breasts. At this moment, who was I in his blind man’s hands? A geisha? No, it was me that he needed. I felt it, and in this way he distanced himself from the dead woman, who had been submerged into the fresh, black earth. He cried out for me, then approached me wordlessly, and his caresses begging . . . but for what?
Still lying down, I fumbled around to slide off my dress. I let him take me in his arms, seek me, trace my skin, my belly, my pubis, then . . .
This is an episode I don’t want to relive, Nawal. I wonder: What is the ridiculous titillation that comes from describing the platitudes of a coupling? His ways and his secrets are, of course, a part of the “other story.” You know this and would have told me before I could myself. Ali’s “real” story had actually taken place with the “other,” the recently departed, who sat up in her bed several days for prayers, the one who died yesterday or the day before yesterday, the mother. But . . .
I let him approach me. Arouse me and take me. It wasn’t a state of denial or abandon that I saw myself in, but as if I were on high, hovering above our two bodies, wrapping myself around his desire that wasn’t real desire but call-for-help desire, this six-year-old child calling out while his forty-year-old man’s body, muscled and knotty, repudiated his dead mother for the first time.
I felt neither in a state of denial nor of abandon, Nawal. He was penetrating me, delving into me. My body . . . would it quiver? At the end, at the height of a moment I’m unable to bring to light, which I can’t relive, Ali was emerging from his den of pleasure, or still there, or on his peak, and I know that he heard a voice, my voice—or the one that betrayed me: It let escape, rather high, one single and distinct word—a wail that I exhaled . . . Did it really issue from my lips?
“Omar!”
Did this make Ali freeze up? I can’t say. Bewildered, I discovered that I too had been elsewhere, and that I’d revealed this to us both. My mind was in a frenzy, and my desire to rescue Ali had gone astray.
I had called to, called for Omar!
Suddenly, an illusion offered itself to come to the rescue, to thwart the wind of disaster, to seal up the hole opened by this single word. Yes, I was fortunate enough to remember, and for a long moment, Ali’s mind must have gone in all directions, trying to wring the meaning from this name. And I felt that he remembered it too, the anecdote we’d laughed about so many times in the early days of our love, when I’d described my first high school sweetheart to Ali. My friends had said he seemed like a “hoodlum.” He was the wildest one in the graduating class and a pick-up artist, a charmer. His name was Omar.
“This will seem strange to you,” I had said to Ali back then. I had the reputation of being the most well behaved, dauntless and austere. And was at the head of the class, of course. Even so, I had discovered that I was in love with Omar. My friends would tease me about i
t. Once he came to talk to me when we were dismissed for the week (I was a boarder). And I—so brazen!—let him accompany me through the city center to the bus station. They saw me smiling at his words, and this familiarity alone was enough. And I admitted that I was attracted to this boy whom I had let approach me one single time.
“Omar? What was he like, this Omar?” Ali had asked, laughing.
“He wasn’t like you, no. I’ve actually forgotten!”
But now, twenty years later, this name was coming back under such strange circumstances. And the husband who had braved the death ceremony, standing over the open grave—I tried to imagine his inscrutable face while Lalla Salma, enveloped in her only khawli, the veil she wore all her life to go out in public, went to join the remains of the two bodies gunned down from before, buried together at the bottom. Then Ali, who had touched me, delved me, penetrated me, now had to grapple with this name, the fugitive memory from a teenage love affair, petals of a jasmine flower suddenly scattered over our marriage bed, a bed of pleasure struck by grief.
Nawal, now I can write to you about it. This foreigner who’d recently told me about his childhood in a faraway land, a place he hadn’t been able to return to for ten years; this man who’d troubled me so, but to whom I’d never reveal the extent of this disruption, letting him only imagine an ordinary game of coquetry on my part; this foreigner who would never again be foreign, yes, his name was “Omar.”
But as this passion was burgeoning, I had never even remembered, no, not once, Nawal—surely because this name, that of the second caliph, so hard and pure in Islam, is so widespread—that even at seventeen I already had the aura of this glorious name on my forehead, so to speak. I’d been teased once or twice as “Omar’s sweetheart.” It hadn’t offended me. Now, this suddenly seemed like a premonitory sketch of my solemn fate.
