by Assia Djebar
I want to say all of this. I say nothing.
Mourad has removed his glasses. He passes his hand over his tired eyes. The pages of the article are scattered across the bedsheets.
The smile he protests with is so sweet. It’s two in the morning. He looks at me thoughtfully and tells me, “But of course somebody has to say things loudly, clearly, strongly! This time it’s me, Naïma. Don’t hold it against me. Next time it will be someone else, and then someone else.”
We don’t turn out the lights right away. Does he come straight to bed? I don’t remember. He gathers up his papers and goes to make copies of them or put them in order.
I lay back down, close my eyes. I haven’t turned off the lights. I want to fall asleep again, to forget the sound of my objections, even the tone of my voice! I feel myself despairing. Eventually, I doze off, leaving the lights on.
I teach Arabic at a nearby school, and I have to start early the next day.
We wake up at dawn, and Mourad and I both get ready. “I copied my article! I’m going to drop it off right away. And then I’ll come back.”
He says this in the kitchen while standing up and gulping down his coffee.
I kiss the little one and follow Mourad. We leave together in a blinding light, and I sit down next to him in the car.
II
Later. Ten minutes later. Outside, just beyond our dead-end road, the street slopes downward between our neighbors’ little villas toward boutiques that are lined up side by side, and there’s already some bustling crowds. It’s highly populated but has an easy feel to it, and has been our neighborhood for thirty years.
Mourad stops the car at the first intersection.
“I’m going to buy the paper,” he announces, getting out of the car.
I wait for him to return with the paper in his hand. I think about the article he wrote the night before and which he’s undoubtedly carrying in an envelope in his pocket.
My window is partially down. A young man—fifteen, sixteen at most—up in front of me, right against the window. He leans his head forward. What does he want? For a second, I think that he’s making faces at me, goofing around. Why? Only then do I see the revolver in his hand. He fires. Once. Twice. But it’s as if the gun is jammed; there’s no shot.
A game, it’s a game. I don’t have time to understand. My spirit is numbed, as if asleep.
There’s a blast outside. A surge of sounds, cries, exclamations. Several long unreal seconds . . . the whole world frozen around them. The young stranger, his hand still in front of him (I no longer see the weapon), looks at me: a pale mask with widened eyes. He disappears. I turn my head toward the strange commotion. There’s shouting, then silence. People are running toward our car . . .
“Mourad!” I look around for him.
The newspaper in his hands, he’s falling. Slowly. I get out—I don’t know how—and cross to the other side. (Later they will say that I screamed, which alerted them all. A few of my women neighbors recognized my voice, and their heads appeared in the windows.)
I’m petrified. Mourad at my feet. So many people thronging around. “They missed me. They killed him! . . .” These words within me: “Mourad, they got him!” Suddenly I go to the car, I don’t know why (the door on this side is still open), and then I head back to my husband, to the ground. I turn around, disoriented. I’m going to wake up! “A game,” is what I had thought when I’d seen the boy with the gun. So there were at least two of them; the other didn’t miss! Finally I crouch down to the ground.
An anger within me, a hardening. I grab the envelope that is sticking halfway out of Mourad’s pocket. My hands grip it. His article. I get back up.
Someone takes me by the shoulders. A woman. One neighbor, then a second.
“Naïma’s shout! I knew right away . . . for Mourad!”
The first woman, holding me by the shoulders, murmurs to me in Arabic, “Poor Mourad! Before they carry him away, ask him for forgiveness!”
I lower myself again. “Why is she telling me this sacred religious formula? Mourad . . . He’s really dead? Really?”
He’s lying on his side. The newspaper has fallen on his head, masking his profile somewhat. A little blackish rivulet is coursing down his forehead.
I remain lowered; my hand extends to just brush his features . . . I can’t . . . “Ask him forgiveness,” the woman had said. “Acquit me of my possible faults, O my husband! And they’re going to carry you away? Like this?” And this newspaper that prevents me from seeing his normal expression! I reach out my fingers again, caress him . . .
My friends and neighbors hold me, take me back to my home, which is so close by. We go in small steps. Supported by them all, I hiccup, “I told him when . . .”
They aren’t listening to me. They want to take care of me. We can hear the ambulance or police siren in the distance growing farther and farther away.
“They’ll bring him back to you! He’ll be returned to you! Pray to God!” A man’s energetic voice, quite loud, rises up from behind us all. But I want to describe how alarmed I’d been that night, and how little Mourad had slept, how he would just write and write. This morning, I had believed that a real morning was beginning for us, as in the past, as . . .
The house is full. I hold onto the article in its envelope. It hasn’t reached the newspaper yet; it will, definitely. It will be printed. Tomorrow, everyone will read what Mourad wrote, even if he is being buried!
And then there’s a sudden, searing pain in me. Last night as he was writing these perilous words, as I was protesting, trying to hold him back, death—yes, death!—irreversible death was on the march!
The visitors describe for one another how the second killer missed me.
A matron who I don’t recognize sighs in a high voice, “It wasn’t her time, poor Naïma!”
I try to resist, but they set me down on a couch. I demand to see our little boy, my son. My relatives—my three sisters, my mother, my sister-in-law had all come—firmly assure me that he was in the company of his cousins. “He’s fine! Get some rest, you!” I listen to them from a distance.
They assure me of this, they talk—rather quietly—although every so often a sharp voice ricochets and grazes me, bringing me back, in spite of myself, to the world, so very real . . . I let myself be surrounded.
A few hours pass by. Later . . . Later, Mourad is brought back. His body in a shroud. Mourad. I can only see his head, his sleeping face. They place him in the salon. I want to sit down next to him.
There’s a confused swell behind me. The voices of the relatives, the cousins, the friends are sometimes overwhelming, but more often they form little waves, overlapping strokes of soft sounds. Yet . . .
I look at you, Mourad, your forehead, the contour of your nose. I observe the grain of your skin near your temples; your closed eyes—your gaze gone forever, alas—and your eyelids fringed by the youthful lashes, and the wrinkle sunken beneath your mouth. I contemplate you, yes. Above your blind man’s face—you, a death mask of stone—a vertigo of silence hollows out a space for itself. An enemy sleep settles.
III
Forty days pass. If Mourad could see me (but he does see me, of course, he follows me in my comings and goings), he wouldn’t be surprised. I work, I show up at school, exactly as Mourad would have expected. My teenage boy . . . I talk to him, I support him, I want to draw him out of his silence. Sometimes I’m successful. I teach my courses as usual, except for the four days just after the funeral, when a colleague took my place.
It’s true that I’m never alone. My family insulates me from my misery, with my mother and my sisters taking turns, two or three at a time, staying with me. My youngest sister, who is married and lives so far away, comes from the other side of the country and stays with me for more than a week. My son stays with one of his aunts and then another. “Leave him with kids his age . . . fortunately, he has so many cousins!” I make sure to spend some time alone with him every day, to check his crut
ches myself. I even believe that it makes him smile when I stroke that beautiful, black hair of his. My eyes suddenly mist over, and I turn away quickly so that he doesn’t see.
Then there are others, not just friends, but also teachers who knew Mourad so well and had respected him. One day, after all of the public demonstrations held in his honor, they come; it’s a Thursday, and I have no classes. There are around fifteen women, all different ages. Some are young, some not-so-young; but they are all high school and college administrators who had worked with Mourad and quote him on his definition of “the school of tomorrow.” Calm and smiling, some of them sad, they come into my house. They hug me, they are here for me. A little later I say that they all really loved Mourad; they talk about him as if he were there . . . My son isn’t intimidated by their presence. A true gathering of family.
They leave; they are like larks taking flight. I retire to the bedroom. I lie down on the bed. I speak out loud, addressing Mourad in both Arabic and French. My youngest sister comes in without knocking. She hesitates in the doorway, then comes in and holds my hand.
“Come back into the living room with us!”
Some women I don’t even know also come to visit; the “wives of victims,” I am told in a whisper. Not only teachers this time, but widows who show up in twos and threes. They offer me their condolences, often without any of the expected religious expressions, without tears. They stay for a visit. My sisters serve the coffee, and we look out the window at the small garden. We exchange platitudes, ordinary remarks about the house or the neighborhood—as if everything were going well, as if the country were at peace, as if . . . I gaze at the scarves on their heads, which are mauve or embroidered white; their mourning seems to go back even further. And with them, they bring me a sweet sorrow.
Forty days I am not alone. Truly embraced.
There are also my students. Every day: girls and boys. A memory I don’t like comes back to me, ambiguous.
Nadia, the one who had filled in for me, had thought she had done well to have the students comment on a hadith of the Prophet, although my classes were simply lessons in Arabic literature and the Arabic language.
According to Abdallah ben Masoud, the Prophet said: “The first judgment rendered among men on Resurrection Day will be in proportion to the effusions of blood!”
She had my youngest students, the ones in the fourth year, copy this “saying” of the Prophet and discuss it in relation to the Verse of Women, verse 95 of the fourth sura, which decrees, “Whoever voluntarily kills a believer will have Gehenna as punishment.”
One of these students repeats the hadith for me, thinking it will make me happy, that it is, indeed, a way of telling me, “We share your pain, all of us.”
Still, I didn’t want to respond to this topic, because then I would have brought up the history of Islam’s beginnings. Of course a Muslim shouldn’t kill another Muslim, and yet wasn’t the third caliph, Othman, assassinated by a Muslim? And the fourth, Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law, was killed by another Muslim in his turn. Thirty years after the Prophet’s death, was there not, alas, the first fitna of this story, which was more political than religious? Isn’t it the same situation in this country, barely thirty years after the independence that we gained at such a price?
But would Mourad, having fought all of his life for what he called a “school of modernity,” have accepted these parallels?
So I resume my classes. I work my students even harder . . . “Little soldier,” my best friend, a colleague in the same school, tells me one time, smiling.
Then there is this day early in the week, an almost ordinary class. I’m handing out copies of an exercise from the last week, an Arabic literary commentary followed by four grammar questions.
While distributing the copies, I recommend, as usual, “Double-check your grades! Redo the math for all of the partial marks. I could have made a mistake on the total!”
Shortly after, an teenage boy exclaims rather loudly from his desk, “Madame, you gave me eighteen over twenty. But I counted; I think I have eighteen and a half!”
There’s a commotion in the classroom. I’m not sure why, but it’s French that comes naturally when I make the sharp retort, “Eighteen? You have eighteen and that’s not enough?”
Actually, I only say the number “eighteen” in French, and then the rest, which is meant only as a teasing joke, is in an Arabic dialect.
Suddenly, the boy, who’s around fifteen, stands up and with his head turned partially toward the others, snaps back, “Do we have a teacher of French or of Arabic?”
I take his acerbic remark—made in Arabic, of course—hard, like an insult, more like a gunshot. The climate of the times, with its ideological conflicts, its suspicions, its aimlessness, is channeled into this young student’s one remark.
I approach the boy. He gets up with a guarded and hostile expression. A young boy of fifteen who couldn’t tolerate my saying dix-huit! A teenager who sees a single foreign word as a target for attack! A student, “my” student, just a kid of fifteen!
I react, protest, I stand up to him passionately. In reality, it wasn’t just the young man and his refusal of this French word that I felt up against! The killer with the jammed gun appeared all of a sudden, in his place . . . He hadn’t been much older than fifteen either . . .
A voice from within: “It was a teenager like this one! He could have been my student!”
And this boy, in this class, with his violent remark about my French—would his gun have jammed, too?
“Yes,” I mock bitterly. “You can’t tolerate a foreign word, a simple word? What country do you live in? What kind of future do you want? I am an Arabic teacher, of course, but Mourad was the best French teacher in the country. When he died, there were many who said so!”
I continue, vehemently. The boy responds to my wrath as if he doesn’t know what to make of it. He stammers, he apologizes. I suddenly realize that I have to calm down. No, this isn’t the killer here before me. No.
I burst into tears, ashamed. I take the boy in my arms . . . and explain it to them all, all these young people around me. The boys and girls are silent, emotional, and then they talk about the current situation, about the school that should be a refuge, a crossroads. And of course they mention the “innocent victims.”
That day, I go back home and I’m overwhelmed. I feel like I’ve fallen to pieces. Tomorrow . . . Tomorrow and the days after that, I won’t be able to go to the school, to go out into the street, to . . . Anxiety, blind fear. The unexpected outburst of tears. The inability to drive the car. And most of all, this infinite lassitude at the break of day.
At home, my son is leaning on his crutches against the frame of my bedroom door and advises me softly, “Rest, Maman! Take a break, you need it!”
Relatives and friends still come and go. Finally alone, I declare, “Broken, I’m broken.” It’s the middle of the afternoon, and I’m in the room. “Our” room.
“Little soldier,” my best friend had said, smiling. “But no!” I tell myself. “A shaky widow, that’s all.”
IV
Yes, forty days later. As if Mourad has left the house for good. I don’t believe it until now, despite the evidence.
One morning I say out loud, primarily to myself, “I want to leave.”
“To leave?” my young sister—the one who had gone back to her husband’s house at the other end of the country—asks me. “What if you come stay with me, for a change of atmosphere?”
“I want to go farther, as far as possible!” I respond, after some reflection. I think, “Mourad left an emptiness in the house, of course, but also in every school, in all our places here!”
Oh yes, to leave for one or two years, with my boy who is doing better, who is walking, thank God. To go as far away as possible.
And cross over this emptiness that Mourad has left us.
—Paris, October 1996
The Woman in Pieces
Baghdad, one night. T
he end—the very end—of the river’s course slopes gently between the city and the palace. Here, at the bottom of this wide river, the Tigris, rests a young woman’s body. A body cut into pieces.
The pieces are wrapped carefully in a veil, the white veil of a city woman. A linen veil, just barely soiled. Just barely bloodied.
The veil is folded inside a carpet, a carpet from Kurdistan. A carpet of gold and silk thread. A precious carpet.
The carpet, rolled halfway, is kept in a coffin, a large coffin made of palm leaves. Freshly cut leaves, cut this very autumn. It is not yet winter.
The coffin made of palm leaves has been sewn carefully with yarn, good red yarn. Sewn tightly.
The coffin itself is preserved in an olivewood trunk, a sealed trunk. A heavy trunk with an ornate lock. Purchased from the best of the city’s artisans.
The chest lies at the bottom of the Tigris, at the deepest part of its bed. Over time, the current has pushed it a few meters, perhaps farther, through the passage that goes from the caliph’s palace to the city below, where the slope of the river is at its steepest.
Perhaps the chest was dragged, despite its weight, to this place where the Tigris enters the city. Inside the chest, inside the coffin made of palm leaves, within the rolled carpet, wrapped in the white linen veil, rests the stranger’s body.
The body of the woman cut into pieces.
Meanwhile, in Baghdad, another drama is brewing, fermenting, threatening to erupt. A drama that is more important than the item about the woman cut into pieces. It concerns the ardent, unstable, cruel, tender, troubled affection that the Commander of the Faithful—on Him be Health and Mercy!—has for his premier vizier. The caliph Haroun el Rachid and his minister—childhood friend, companion by day and by night, advisor to his politics and leisure—the just, the handsome, the well-loved Djaffar the Barmékide.
