by Assia Djebar
One night among the nights, the caliph, his friend Djaffar, and Massrour the sword bearer go wandering the streets of Baghdad. They prefer to go incognito; tonight they are wearing disguises. They encounter a fisherman who is returning from the river with empty nets. He declaims his ill fortune, thinking of his five or six children, who, along with their mother, are waiting for him to come back so they can eat. To console himself, the fisherman improvises a poignant song.
Touched, Haroun el Rachid offers the fisherman a hundred dinars (a fortune) to hasten back to the Tigris and cast his nets again. “Invoke my name,” adds the disguised caliph. “It will bring you luck!”
Taking him for a rich and jolly night owl, the fisherman obeys. He drags back an olivewood casket, so heavy and locked! He gives it to the caliph. The fisherman goes on with his hundred gold pieces, happy and content.
Massrour, so vigorous, carries the sealed chest back to the palace. By the light of the torches, Djaffar and Massrour break the lock. Find the casket. Cut the red woolen thread. Unfold the precious carpet. Pull back the veil, just barely soiled, of white linen. Discover the body of the woman. The young woman in pieces.
According to the tale of the mythical sultan, the stranger they contemplate is “as fair as virgin silver”!
At the sight of this dead—massacred and dead—beauty, the caliph, the tenderhearted caliph, bursts into tears.
He cries for a long time. Then, as is so often the case with him, his deep sorrow transforms into rage. He is furious with his friend.
“And so, under my reign, such murders are committed! And so such crimes remain unpunished, and the victims are sunk into the river without anybody knowing! This spilled blood will come back to haunt me on the final judgment day! Oh Djaffar, I swear that if you don’t find the culprit for me, I will have you hanged, in his stead, at the palace gates.” And, moved by who knows what harbored resentment, he adds, “You and forty of your cousins, the Barmékides!”
Djaffar grows pale. He gets on his knees. “Grant me, oh Master, three days’ time!”
The caliph grants him his request, but the vizier spends these three days in his house, pondering his impending fate. On the third day, carpenters appear in front of the palace, hammering wood together for the tall gallows.
The time has come (walking down a street in another Arab city, it is Atyka who imagines all of this, imagines all of this today), yes, the time has come to go back to the young woman, to the stranger when she was alive, alive and happy.
Algiers, 1994. Atyka, professor of French, a language she has chosen, that she enjoys teaching.
It was different for her father and mother. Even though Berber was their first language and Arabic their second, they could study only in French at the colonial school.
When she was twenty, Atyka, born in the same year as Algeria’s independence, decided to earn her degree in French.
“I’m surprised,” her father told her. “You, so good in Arabic . . . I saw you in Arabic linguistics, in Islamic exegesis, a specialist in Muslim law . . . but what do I know?”
“Leave her alone,” the mother said to him. “It’s obvious that she hears us laugh and argue in what? In French! It’s we two that she loves in this language!”
And Atyka, knowing her mother’s penchant for stories and literature, replied, “I’m going to be a French professor. But you see, with truly bilingual students, French will let me come and go, not just in multiple languages—but in all ways.”
This sunny morning, Atyka hurries to school and thinks about her second class, her favorite. She’s conducting an experiment: she’s going to introduce variations on some of the first nights of Scheherazade’s tale. Because she’s been fortunate enough to have the same class five days in a row, she’s trying her luck at skirting along, improvising on the tale that frames at least ten of the sultan’s nights.
With light steps, Atyka winds her way down from the heights of her suburb, which lies just on the outskirts of the city. Beneath her feet, at the horizon, is the immutable sea. She daydreams, then begins the next dialogue with her students. In her thoughts, she is in Baghdad, next to the Tigris, at the time of Haroun el Rachid and his vizier, Djaffar the Barmékide.
Baghdad, a few weeks before the caliph and his two companions go adventuring in the night.
A happy couple. Both of them are young. The husband is in love. Well off, just like his father-in-law. An upstanding citizen.
The young wife (“She remains nameless, alas,” Atyka says to herself. “How can you name somebody who first shows up in pieces?”) has been married six years, perhaps seven. She has given birth three times, and three times to boys, hardy babies that had to be fed and nursed. Three births, all in a row. When the third child has just turned six months old, the young mother, who is twenty-one, falls ill. It begins when she starts feeling lethargic in the morning. Her father, who has nothing but this one daughter, comes to visit her every afternoon.
Seeing her pale cheeks, he thinks that her beauty, radiant until now, seems like it’s filtered through a transparency. It worries him. The old man advises his daughter to request a second servant. He would have already paid for one himself had he not feared that it would have insulted his son-in-law, who is obviously in love and for whom money is never an issue.
The enfeebled young woman is overcome by sudden fits of fatigue every morning, sometimes prey to vague desires, making her worry that she is pregnant again. A fourth! She can’t discuss it with her father. She has no mother, whom she lost as a child . . . no aunt, no elder sister . . . Ah, if it were only possible for her to avoid being weighed down with another burden, to avoid the arrival of a fourth baby. Sapped anew of her powers, she wonders who she can confide in. Who can she tell that she is weary of life, especially of the charge of giving life? And how to live—that is, to love—without giving life? Is it wrong not to want to be weighed down so? Alas, whether they are males or not, they are milking, demanding, flesh that devours . . . What woman can she speak to about such things?
The household is full, the household is happy. The boys’ father is gone mornings and evenings, and the grandfather visits in the afternoon. A young servant—a teenager who speaks a foreign dialect—watches over them. No mother, no friends, not even an old woman. The husband, who agrees on this point with his father-in-law, mistrusts all women and does not want anyone from the outside meddling in their affairs.
Day after day, the pain grows worse. No, it’s not a second servant she needs. Every night, the husband, happy and exuberant, takes her in his arms, caresses her, entreats her. She loves to sleep the whole night through in his arms. And he’s the one who gets up when, across the room, one of the children moves in his sleep. The vague weariness weighs on the young mother. Not just in the morning, when the husband is away working at his shop. One evening, she sighs out loud; some days she doesn’t get out of bed. At night, between the sheets, by her favorite citronella candle, she silently moves away from the husband.
A first time. A second time. It makes his heart freeze. He says nothing. No longer insists. During the day, sometimes he can no longer take part in the discussions of men. He falls quiet, grows anxious. On the way home, he tells himself, “She’s sick, it’s true!” so as to encourage himself to have the patience and tenderness that doesn’t ask for anything more.
The young woman has decided not to tell him that she might be pregnant again, which would kindle joy in his face, his darling face. It makes her bitter. The boys, of course, are adorable. The oldest especially. Already five years old, a boisterous joker, he loiters outside with the neighborhood kids. She should be keeping all three of them in the enclosed garden, under her watch. But this child gets away from her. His mother has grown weary of admonishing him; she prefers the silence that hollows out the space around her.
One morning, she is gripped by an unexpected longing so strong that she speaks without thinking. Perhaps she has, blearily, surrendered. She will have the fourth child. It’s fa
te and this time fate could bring a little girl.
And so she hears herself saying aloud, in the diffuse light of the young autumn (the trees have just borne so much fruit), “Oh Lord, I so want an apple today! A red apple! One that is hard but succulent and juicy on the inside, as in times of old!”
Her husband, crossing the patio to leave, stops and turns back on his steps, smiling at her with sudden hope. “I haven’t seen them in the market these days, but your wish shall be granted, mother of my sons!”
And, despite being in broad daylight and even though the servant has stopped in front of them, he leans over his wife and kisses her passionately on the lips. She, stupefied by her own request as much as by the husband’s impulsive display of affection outside the bedroom, is embarrassed, and she laughs.
He leaves, and her cascading laughter accompanies him in the street.
He decides to close the stall, or at least entrust his business to his associate for the day or a few hours.
The way she announced her longing for a red apple (in kissing his wife, he could tell that she had spoken on impulse and immediately regretted it) has excited him in body and soul. A heat rises in him. There’s a memory that he recalls, and all day he’s haunted by the intensity of it. What’s more devastating than an unconsummated desire, if not the memory of another desire?
A scene, resuscitated from around a year and a half ago: his wife was sick, even worse than now. A violent fever. A first doctor, a second, then a consultation with both of them at the same time. The husband hadn’t given the cost a second thought. Ten days later, she was up on her feet again and recovered quickly. One morning, ardent after the long spell of abstinence—he remembers—he let his desire for her swell. “I would like, tonight . . .”
“Me too,” she cried out, exuberantly. “To find you inside of me again, to have you pierce me right through!”
She said she felt as if a second fever had followed the first. On the threshold of their room, she recited, lips against lips, the first lines of a poem of shared love:O watcher of the star,
be my boon companion,
and O wakeful spy on the lightning,
be my nocturnal comrade!
He was on fire, about to push her down, his hands uncovering her breasts, his clumsy embrace forcing her against the doorjamb.
“Not now!” she protested.
She slipped away in her silk moiré tunic; she went out onto the patio, where the air was embalmed with the scent of orange blossoms. (“So it was springtime,” he remembers.) He followed her, and she added, “I’m going to the hammam today. I’m going to get ready, shave, perfume myself. For you, for this evening.”
She moved away. He contemplated her svelte form, which was wrapped in green moiré. It made him happy to know that he was going to spend the whole day suspended in desire.
Having just conjured up the preparations for the hammam, the servant dallied. The husband promised to have unguents, fruits of all sorts, and rare perfume essences brought; but the young woman, a secret smile on her lips, admitted, “I want apples! Golden apples and red apples.”
Once the servant was gone, she came near and even pressed up against him, murmuring coquettishly, “I want to nibble on an apple before you nibble me tonight!”
He would see to everything. Before going to the hammam, that very morning, she would receive the most beautiful of apples. He would buy kilos of them at the market. Yes, she would sink her teeth into her favorite fruit, go into the burning-hot room, emerge perfumed, enraptured, pink, all hot. Hot for him, for his nighttime nibbles. She would have her golden apples and her red apples that very morning. He left prepared to obey her every caprice, her hunger for him, his unfulfilled hunger for her.
It’s been that way for a year and a half.
He is certain, now, that their last son was conceived on precisely that night. With such assaults and effusions—violence and tenderness—they had enjoyed that tumultuous night!
“May happiness return,” he murmurs, his desire for her rekindled.
He must buy her apples. As before. He closes up the stall, hurries through the poorer parts of town, comes to the place where all the fruit merchants congregate. Coming in from the countryside, they station themselves here at dawn, then stroll along and wander off in the direction of other markets.
He goes from one display to the next, searching and browsing. Before long he comes to the conclusion, “No apples, not one! They have been out of season for at least a month.”
The caravans that have come from far away could have brought some. But it’s the season for trading dates of all grades, as well as their alcohol, which is sold with greater discretion. There are also mangoes, pineapples, strange fruits from China and even beyond—but not a single apple.
He accosts this or that merchant. He is ready to pay; if he finds an apple he’ll pay its weight in gold, if necessary. The merchants turn their heads dismissively, and he doesn’t press the issue. There aren’t any more, and that’s that.
As if he were filled with this frustrating desire himself, the husband has become obsessed with the fruit. He can almost taste the juice, can already feel the skin snapping under his teeth. And the night of reciprocated desires that lies ahead . . .
“Maybe in the gardens, beyond the triple ramparts of the city! Surely it wouldn’t be worth the merchants’ while to bring their last ones here! Who would be interested in paying for apples at the cost of their weight . . . in gold?” He smiles, excited. “Who, apart from me, today?”
He turns in the opposite direction and traverses the city. Once outside the ramparts, he starts out energetically on the dusty road. He sees the small valleys of orchards in the distance. In vivid detail, he imagines his wife—she who will bite down with her pearly teeth—lounging in their courtyard, and he tells himself, “Surely I’ll find the fruit on the branches of the trees! I’ll pick them myself! If I have to, I’ll even buy the tree!”
It’s hot. The sun is nearing its zenith, and already the air vibrates with the intense heat. The morning is not yet over.
“I won’t tempt the growers with promises of gold. I will wait, I will hide, until I find at least one apple growing on a tree!”
He’s prepared to steal for her, but it doesn’t matter. All of the apple trees are bare, their branches almost dead. The ground is scattered with leaves. He will be no pillager, no, he will be a traveler.
In the evening, he returns empty-handed, but there’s a gleam in his eye. “Tomorrow I’m going to Bassora. I will bring you back what you desire, O my heart!”
She says nothing and rests in his arms. Just a short while ago, she kissed him, admitted her infinite fatigue to him—he who had spent the whole day crossing the city, inspecting the orchards. She sighed, “O Lord, I hope that I am not pregnant again!”
“And why not? You could rest.”
“Am I strong enough to have a fourth child?” she whispered, then started to doze off.
He gets up before dawn and kisses his three sleeping boys. With his traveling things in hand, he goes into the blackness, meets up with a cohort of merchants leaving for the southeast. He will go to Bassora; he’s made his decision.
He leaves as if he were drunk to go on this adventure. Will he stay there for three days or even more? He doesn’t know. He scrawled a few lines, folded the note, bid the servant (he can speak to her in her native Kurdish) to bring the note to his father-in-law, who will watch over the household every day and, likewise, every night.
His desire nearly drove him to thieve. He travels. For his wife. So that she will get better. While he is gone, her father sees to it that the first two doctors come back, just in case things get worse. But maybe these coveted apples, the apples brought back from the end of the earth by the loving husband, will make the young wife smile again, make her better?
Yes, he leaves before dawn. In the middle of the caravan, he doesn’t turn back, even when, an hour later, the circular, golden blot of Baghdad disappear
s below the horizon.
It’s the end of Atyka’s second session with her favorite class. She wanted to turn the tale upside down, to go into the details of the young wife, palpitating, still alive, and the husband’s love, so momentous. But Atyka kept the scenes of the couple’s tenderness and sensuality to herself (she had dreamed of them for a long time that morning, on her walk to school). She let herself be carried away by her imagination . . . This late spring morning, Atyka heads back to where she lives, high up in Algiers. She told her students, “Tomorrow we’ll be in Bassora! But before, look at a map; we’ll come back to Baghdad. And,” she laughed, “bring the text, of course. The Arabic text, for those who want it, and the translation.”
On the way back, Atyka is happy, glancing at the immense bay down below . . . happy to imagine herself almost in between this couple—to imagine this languorous stranger from Baghdad, in the time of Haroun el Rachid and Djaffar. This fragile dream pursues her and is readying itself—she knows not when or how—to reel.
The husband’s journey lasts ten days. Three days to get there, four in the strange, opulent city that is almost rural in many parts, and three days to come back (with a different caravan). He ends up finding three apples in a luxurious garden cultivated by a mulatto (born to a Yemenite father and an Indian woman, no doubt). They are on a spindly, elegant tree with a silhouette worthy of an inspired miniaturist.
Three red apples. Hard. Almost perfectly round. Swollen with the juice that awaits the dolorous young wife.
He offers: “One dinar! Two dinars! Three dinars!”
