by Assia Djebar
“Without a doubt!” I answered him, smiling. Then I got up. And I don’t know why, but I caught myself suddenly crying because of what this old man, apparently rambling, had said.
“Like me,” I said, “this stranger is passing through.”
Sitting on this plane, I retrace the facts of my interior life. They’ll describe me later on, in the next century, as a wax figure, a little statue that leaned and leaned until it finally fused with itself, always in the same place, and then disappeared.
Since the day of Ashura (it used to be called the “children’s feast,” with pancakes, hard-boiled eggs, and almonds) and until yesterday (this last night before the departure, I slept straight through with fatigue), I was consistently waking up in the middle of the night, usually at the same time. A single thought, tenacious, a blade of steel penetrating the sludge of sleep, would rouse me, gleaming before my staring, open eyes: “How to retrieve your image again, as concretely as possible?” Your face first: I tried to draw each of its features in the emptiness until it was brought back to life, intact, mobile. But most importantly, I tried to perceive your voice—its texture, its tone, its velvet, its vibrato, its shifts. Yes, your speech and the sound of you!
In the cold heart of the night, immobilized between the sheets, without turning on the lamp, I rose like a drowned woman from the oblivion of a ravenous sleep—thus stirred, I would quest. I’d look for you, unflagging in my desire to recreate you.
The nocturnal effort alone would keep me awake for a long time, as if my legs and my arms, all of my nerves and my muscles had detected the precise moment when your image was no longer coiled in me as a silky seaweed restraining me in the waters of my sleep. And when I found myself again at a moment where I’d forgotten you, my body, given over to your empire, would rebel. Awaken.
How not to lose anything of this story that is just beginning? A sura in the Koran, sura XII of Joseph, whose versets I memorized as a child, begins: “The most beautiful of stories.” But “the story” will surely remain only as a beginning between us, suspended.
Will I give you this missive when the plane lands? The day after? I don’t know how to end this without confessing everything, for I’ve already told you too much! I won’t tear anything up; I won’t give anything away. I will wait. Isma
Several times, Ali touched his fingers to Isma’s signature, written in Arabic letters. Then he abandoned the wispy arabesque.
Lifting himself heavily from his chair, Ali decided that before leaving this empty place (he had come there the day before, just prior to curfew, then slept in his clothes on the sofa), he would mail this letter, which he’d sealed, for Amsterdam.
He wrote two short lines on a piece of cardboard: “Isma was killed the day before yesterday, February 28. This letter, which she wrote to you, belongs to you. Ali.”
He signed, in turn, in Arabic letters.
VII
The day before, Ali had set out the two empty suitcases, then quickly arranged Isma’s things. In addition to her clothes, he took two or three books, a few notebooks, some sheets of Canson paper and an open box of charcoal, and finally her drawings. There were around ten, all of landscapes, as if she had enjoyed sitting by the window and bringing out the plays of light on the fronts of the buildings across the way. Several times, she had drawn a cypress that could be seen in the facing courtyard.
The drawer in the small writing desk was locked. Ali had other things on his mind, and hadn’t forced the issue. Then he decided to spend the night there. He had flopped down, leaving the dim bedside lamp on. Unexpectedly, he fell into a brutal sleep. Indeed, for two days he had been continually on the go. There had been formalities, questionnaires to fill out, decisions to make, some in cooperation with Isma’s brother, her only relative in the capital.
So he slept as one plunges into undersea depths. For a long time? In the middle of the night, he woke up, fumbled for a moment, threw a light on the whole room. He realized that while sleeping, he had said to himself: “The key . . . the key. Look for it in an overcoat, a jacket that she’d wear to go out!”
These commands he’d given himself had woken him up. He in fact did find a small key in the pocket of a raincoat that remained in the entryway closet. Taking his time, he went to the writing desk, opened the drawer, took out a rather large student’s notebook with cross-ruled pages. One of Isma’s journals? Ali felt as if he had reached the goal, but what goal? He took some time to wash his face, dry it, smoke a cigarette.
Ever since he had come here the day before, little by little the presence of his wife—whom he hadn’t seen since she had gone into hiding—had asserted itself. Now to read her, to rediscover her . . . Calmed, he made himself comfortable.
Fifty pages, hardly more, were covered with her tight and regular handwriting, inclined a little to the right. He had the melancholy feeling that he was returning almost to the year of their engagement, when, having gone abroad for her diploma, she’d consistently written him long letters with such a natural tone, like an ongoing conversation. Almost ten years later, her handwriting, leaning toward the right, had not changed.
While reading, Ali forgot everything in the silence of the night; he didn’t lift his head a single time. He rediscovered Isma’s voice, its fervors, its taste of confidences. She addressed herself to Nawal, persisted in the belief that she was still alive . . .
He finished reading and found an unsealed letter stapled to the back cover. He hesitated, preferring to return to what he had read. Dreamily, he smoked a cigarette. Then, as one throws oneself on a bottle of wine to get drunk, he started to reread. He seemed to have already forgotten everything, remembering only the sound and the phrasing of this voice. He wanted to hear it, as one creeps up on a conversation behind a door. Now, wasn’t she over there, with Nawal?
He read everything again as if for the first time. He had the impression of being caught up in a dialogue; Isma spoke only to Nawal, seemed to be seeking Nawal’s opinion or judgment, even with this “passion” (the word was certainly hers). Ali wasn’t pained by this; the only thing his heart needed was to feel her close. In fact, he nearly heard her, in the variability of her tone, her rhythms, and even in her momentary silences. He skipped a few successive pages of deletions, which she had crossed out with a large oblique line—as if she was about to change the recipient, maybe to him, Ali, or maybe to this “other”? Therefore, Ali disregarded these pages that had been rendered almost illegible, but which he could have deciphered. A little farther on, he recovered the thread of these tender confidences, sometimes verging on despair or expressing a sudden harrowing doubt. (Nawal truly dead, or alive?) Ali listened to the voice, so dear to him, which floated, which unwound a phantom chronicle with anxieties, with laughter, almost . . . He continued up to the letter, didn’t want to open this missive stapled to the cover. He stopped, both invigorated and uneasy: the desire to have a dialogue with her, to respond in Nawal’s place. She, Isma, at this same table, hours in this room—narrow, but so bright—with this bay across from the buildings and this cypress, which she had drawn so often, in the courtyard . . .
Isma and Nawal, in this notebook. In Ali’s hands.
He had gone to Nawal’s burial, and hoped to find Isma there, even if she was still incognito. It had been less than a full month since she’d gone into hiding. He would have liked to tell her: “Yes, I saw Nawal’s open eyes in the room in the morgue, her head partially inclined on what remained of an arm, of a shoulder, of part of a torso, her hair plastered but short, curly, colored with henna, and, underneath, this wide-open eye! It was me, the doctor, whom they let go in first, as the body could not be reconstituted as a whole. No, but this half of a face, this eye, and the hair colored with henna . . . An eye without a gaze, Nawal truly absent or tortured by death itself!
“Nawal’s mother was in the corridor. They prevented her from entering, even though she’s an experienced midwife. She shrieked, shrieked in the corridor. She struggled. I didn’t have the co
urage, Isma, to tell them that the mother would recognize the open eye of her only daughter, that . . . I’m a coward, Isma, I fled through another door.”
Ali still hesitated before this letter that Isma had written on the plane to Holland the year before. “For eight days,” she had announced, “to finish this work with the foreign musician.” It was when she returned that she had wanted them to separate. As a first step, Ali had suggested that she occupy one story of the rather vast house by herself. She no longer talked of leaving, but upon receiving the first threat, she disappeared into the city. She only called him once in a while to reassure him.
Ali didn’t read the letter that Isma had written until the following dawn. After hastily writing the two lines on the piece of cardboard to announce Isma’s death to the recipient, he sealed the letter and put it in his pocket.
He emptied the drawer: pens, the notebook, of course, and the Canson paper. He left a little bottle of India ink, which was designated as special for calligraphy. He closed the second suitcase.
Loaded down with luggage, Ali left. He reached his car, which was parked nearby. He drove mechanically, dreaming that he would have time to drop off everything at their apartment.
Soon, at eleven o’clock, the body would be taken out at the hospital. Some friends, maybe all, would be there . . . The wake would be at the house of Isma’s brother, a civil servant who lived in the heights of the city.
The next morning, Ali and his brother-in-law would accompany the coffin to Cirta. From then on, Ali would call Constantine by its ancient name, as Isma always did.
Back at home, Ali went into the bathroom before he changed. Once naked, he had an acute sense of disappearance, of “her” disappearance. He exposed himself to the hottest water possible, running the risk of burning himself. As the jets sprayed him violently, hurting him, there was the ceaseless beating of a thought. The following days, he was tormented by these words, always the same: “Being the first one to get there, I’ll be the first to see her face in the open coffin. It will be as it was yesterday, I hope. A face that is calm, almost a young girl’s. Her hair, flowing along the length of her neck, as before. I hope. I will see her. I will watch over her . . .”
He gets out of the shower, dries himself, gets dressed, rushes off, and these unuttered words remain within him: “Three bullets to the heart! Fortunately, not in the face! She’s on her way, in her unspoiled beauty. I will be the first to see her face, in the still-open coffin! . . . Her face will be as it was before, I hope. I will see her! I will look after her!”
—May 1996
The Attack
For Zohra
I
The night before Mourad’s death, he woke me up at two o’clock in the morning—the night just before . . .
Mourad comes into the room, turns on the lights, shakes me by the shoulders, and says in an ardent—hot and ardent—voice, “Naïma, I’m begging you . . . wake up! I need you . . .”
He caresses my hair, then my forehead. My eyes are opening, blinking. I can distinguish his thin face leaning over me.
With effort I ask, “What do you want?”
I have been sleeping so well these last fifteen days. My husband is living back at home and my son is starting to walk, little by little, on his crutches. I can finally rest every night, at ease.
I repeat, “What do you want?”
He sits at the foot of the bed. He’s holding some papers.
“Naïma, read my article, I’m begging you! I’ve finally finished it! Read it! I’m going to give it to the newspaper, first thing tomorrow morning. Read it for you and for me! I couldn’t wait.”
I sit up, completely awake. In search of my glasses, my hand rummages around on the nightstand.
Mourad gets impatient and changes his mind. “Look, I’ll read it to you out loud! Then you can tell me what you think.”
I have found my glasses. I’ve put them on and keep them on.
“I’m listening! Go ahead.”
Suddenly, making a brisk motion with my arm, I interject, “I hope that this time you won’t sign your name, will you? You’ll use a pseudonym?”
“Naïma, listen to me first. Of course I’m going to sign it.”
For at least three months now, at the rate of one long, vehement, polemic article per week, Mourad has insisted on signing the analyses, denunciations, and declamations he makes for the entire country. “Opposed . . . everybody knows that I am opposed. Opposed to power, opposed to fanatics, opposed to silence and complacency! I would have preferred to write just about schools, about how our schools must be!”
This is the way he usually talks with me—making impassioned dialogues before we make our way to our room. At least over these fifteen days that he hasn’t been in hiding anymore. After being flooded with threats—letters and phone calls declaring him “a dead man”—he’d been living semi-incognito.
And so Mourad stopped his work as a French instruction inspector, though he still worked now and then. But not full-time, only erratically . . . Previously, he wrote his weekly articles for two independent newspapers, under different names.
Going underground has meant changing his domicile as often as possible, not calling us for news, except through a third party, who was usually a different person every time. His demeanor has changed . . . Then, there have been these two weeks of unexpected—perhaps illusory—calm since my son was able to come back from the French hospital, where he had an operation for his scoliosis. We felt so happy, so relieved, almost to the point of being dazzled, that the boy was slowly recovering his ability to walk! This luck came to us abruptly, and so Mourad settled down in the house again, even if the neighbors would surely notice . . . but still, it seemed that even in the city, there was an ephemeral calm floating in the air! For the first few days, Mourad went out as rarely as possible and did nothing but talk with his son, but he gradually returned to an almost regular rhythm. And I, at peace, would sleep at night!
We are finally relaxed enough to be there for our son who will soon be healthy again, thank God!
But Mourad writes day and night. Writes and signs his name. And soliloquizes in front of everyone!
In the middle of the night, I fret in his arms. “Why are you writing like this again, without concealing your identity?”
“Leave me alone!” he retorts.
“What if you were to leave? Just for a little while. Like a vacation! . . . Write from elsewhere, see the situation from a more serene point of view . . . What if you were to go away for a month or two? It would give us such peace of mind here!”
“Stop! Don’t you understand? I will live and die here. In my country, my home!”
“You’re just stubborn. That’s nothing to be proud of!” And I’d sigh like this every time. But I’d do so without bitterness.
And so Mourad gets ready to read me his article. Yesterday, the press announced that the president has decided to let the chouyoukhs out of prison as a gesture of conciliation and to open himself up to the possibility of a dialogue with the fundamentalists.
These days, every integrationist leader here calls himself a sheikh! They mean to be, by this term of address (which the true leaders of former times never dared call themselves), fathers to those young gang leaders who have declared themselves emirs, or princes!
During the extreme agitation of the past two years, these same chouyoukhs (the plural of sheikh) were still imams in the mosques, giving inflammatory sermons, making use of Savonarola-like eloquence . . . to lambast a central power that was growing increasingly unpopular. Then the president was deposed, and the army intervened in the political sphere, persuading one of yesterday’s heroes—a man of integrity but unknown to the youth of the rough neighborhoods—to lead the executive office. Six months later, a “madman” shot down the new president on live television. Point-blank. Ever since, the mad machine has had a mind of its own; day after day, violence, murders, repression. A fatal cycle.
Among Mourad’s friends a
nd fellow resistance fighters, so many have fallen; two bullets in the head for some, the less fortunate were slashed with knives in the shadows. And so I think again of these feverish and terrible months while my husband slowly reads his text, using vehemence to attack recent political events, sarcasm to describe the alleged “reaching out” to the chouyoukhs, who have been elevated by the prestige of having been imprisoned. Then Mourad returns to his favorite theme: how the hopelessness of seeing our youth given over to demagoguery can be combated only through education, through training, through their elders speaking out courageously . . .
And so he reads four or five pages in a row. He stops. He catches his breath. Looks at me.
“What do you think?” he asks me weakly.
I get up out of bed. I don’t spare his feelings. “This is how you’re getting your death sentence rolling. Of course you’re snubbing them! Are you going to sign it, like the others?”
He nods silently. He looks at me and his expression is suddenly sad. Growing angry, I say indignantly, “Tell me, then, why does it have to be you, you alone, you, a mere father, not even one of those who are ‘responsible,’ as they would say, you who have been hiding out for a year? Yes, tell me, why is it you who speaks, who intervenes, who ‘carries’ the country? You, all on your own!”
I move up against him, but am desperately furious. “You can’t stay still! Can’t you just stay with us two, with me and the little one, and simply forget everything else for a second?”
I stop; there are sobs in my voice. “We were just starting to be so happy, these past days. And my boy who may walk as before . . . And you finally sleeping by my side every night!”
