The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry

by Assia Djebar

  “The body of the woman cut into pieces. The body, the head. But the voice?”

  In the white city of today, so far from the Tigris, Omar hears the caliph Haroun el Rachid weeping ceaselessly before the body of the woman in pieces.

  —June 1996

  PART TWO

  BETWEEN FRANCE AND ALGERIA

  Annie and Fatima

  This is the story of a friend of my sister’s, Annie. They knew each other in Paris, while taking a Berber class together. I meet her for the first time in Algiers. She has come from Paris and is staying with me for the night. In the evening, we have a private moment, get to know each other. Her story opens, and in the semidarkness, its flowers of poignant hope blossom.

  Algiers remains a peaceful capital, though its rhythm is of course punctuated by the frenzy of the new political parties, of newspapers just recently formed. The belief in “a new political life.”

  Annie has something to get off her chest. The following day she is going to leave for the eastern part of the country. In a reserved tone, matter-of-factly, she explains how emotional she is at finally being able to meet little Fatima. Her little girl.

  It is a commonplace story, surely repeated many times between two countries. Two people in love split up. One of them—usually the man, sometimes the woman—takes their child by force, to bring back to his or her country.

  The other parent is helpless, and the struggle begins against the formidable windmill of time, which makes the child grow so quickly—too quickly—far from the watch of the other, dispossessed parent.

  Two countries, France and Algeria, that history bound for so long in a struggle—in a coupling?—ravaged by passion, by desire, by violence. Over the course of the twenty or thirty years that followed the painful but complete separation of their national fates, a few individuals—Algerian men there, French women here, or the reverse—would reunite the “couple” within the private sphere, without realizing that they were taking up parts, in spite of themselves, in a ghostlike play. Definitely a love story, mimicking a celebration of the past and investing this last encounter, despite it all, with retroactive hope. As if a dead impulse back at work in a new setting, and they didn’t even realize that they were the doubles of a two-faced past, the wretches! The lovers imagined they were living their story for their own sake, but were playing out an obscure debt. And the miasmas still linger, their magic or poison creating a desire to kill, to annihilate the other.

  Some of these unions between the Algerians and the French turn out to be well matched. And so they are no longer victims at the mercy of History, the old tragedienne haunted by moldering roles.

  But late into this Algiers night, Annie tells me about the circumstances of her marriage ten years earlier.

  She had come to Paris from her native Anjou. Idir, the “chosen one,” was a bricklayer who had immigrated about four or five years before and who lived in a home for single foreign men—he worked hard, sent his money to Little Kabylia, and had never approached a European woman.

  Annie was the first one he dared speak to. They had met by chance at a record store where Annie had been listening to a Berber lament that was popular at the time. Before she bought the record, she asked what the words meant, and the clerk called over his neighbor, Idir, who was hanging around the store—it was a Saturday. Annie listened to him recite the verses of the lament, smiling at him innocently with her large eyes. She paid for the record, said good-bye to the two young people, and then came back the following Saturday. Idir was the first man she gave herself to. “He was so handsome and so good!” she remembered and, nostalgically added, “There was such a sweetness, but something strangely rough in his native language!”

  Before long she married him, even though her father had reservations when she suggested bringing her fiancé to her village to introduce him to her parents. “An Arab? Are you sure?”

  “Father, he speaks Kabyle, not Arabic!”

  “It’s the same thing,” grumbled the father, who still made no objection.

  They were happy for two years, despite Idir’s jealousy. He was too hot-tempered—generally about petty things. Annie was usually the one who gave in. She would do her duties as a secretary, keeping her distance from her colleagues, and then come back to their home. She was lonely again, as when she had first arrived in Paris.

  Then she had a baby girl: Fatima. During the months that followed, the couple’s life was stormy but there were brief respites of sweetness and understanding. Still, at that time, the smallest thing would set him off.

  “Of course,” Annie admits, “he was working too much! What bothered him most of all was that I was carrying on as usual at the office, so every morning I had to leave my daughter with a nanny!

  “We were constantly fighting, for six months,” she continues. “One fine day I asked for a divorce. And we separated.” Annie pauses, choked up.

  The next morning, she leaves for Constantine. She’s going to come back here four or five days later.

  I reassemble the fragments of what she couldn’t convey all at once. With the breakup came the divorce proceedings. Annie was taking care of Fatima, who was six or seven months old. She agreed quite readily to leave her with Idir on Sundays; later on, he would have her for vacations. Annie didn’t make any special attempts to keep the daughter and the father apart. But Fatima was so young! Idir would certainly remain an affectionate father, Annie was sure of this. Even though he had proven to be an overly difficult husband, he had a gentle disposition. She did not at all foresee the possibility that tensions between them would intensify. For years afterward, she would reproach herself for being so thoughtless.

  Because the separation immediately became an abyss for Idir. He still loved his wife, even though they were separated, and said so. But how could he endure being cut off from his daughter? She was going to grow up, and he would have her only on Sundays? He suddenly discovered, like a swelling abscess, that this was France for you: a country where the father was not all-powerful.

  Idir made up his mind. After spending one or two silent and mournful Sundays at his former father-in-law’s house in the Anjou village, he took a taxi back two weeks later. He had it wait just a little farther off at a corner.

  He came inside. Annie smiled at him, and they said hello to one another. She was changing the baby’s diaper. With a grand gesture, she held out Fatima, whose buttocks were bare and whitened with talc, to him.

  “Wait for me for a second! I’m going to look for some new diapers, and I’ll also tell Father that you’re here.”

  Her father would certainly insist that Idir eat with them, she told herself. She quickly went up to the second floor, toward the bathroom. The front door, which was next to the kitchen and led into the entrance hall, had remained ajar.

  Annie told her father from the staircase and came back down with the laundry. The door was open. Nobody! She started down the front steps. A taxi disappeared into the distance.

  Two or three times she called out, “Idir!”

  It was an hour before she decided to call her lawyer’s home number. Still flustered, she asked her father, “What should I do?” She still believed that in an act of desperation, Idir had taken his daughter for a walk, “just to be alone with her!”

  “With her bottom bare?” her father replied. Then he added, “Better notify the police and tell them about the taxi!”

  Pacing from room to room, she lost one more hour before facing the facts: Idir had kidnapped Fatima. Forever? No, she didn’t think so.

  She didn’t sleep at all that night. In the morning, the lawyer decided to give descriptions of Idir and the baby to the border patrols.

  But on Sunday, Idir—who had decided to give up everything, his job, his home, his unfinished projects—had taken a plane, that very night, for Algiers. His little girl would stay with him. “Forever,” he said to himself, subdued and resolved.

  Nine—nearly ten—years later. Annie spent most of this time as if pa
ralyzed. No, she didn’t join the committees of French mothers who had been severed, like her, from their children. No, the only thing that she agreed to sign, not counting the divorce—which went through almost automatically—was the lawyer’s request to hold Idir for questioning, were he to suddenly return. Idir, who never came back. Annie quickly came to the conclusion that this man had given up everything he had in France, turned his back on it, all for Fatima.

  She surely had the right address for the village in Kabylia. Yet all her letters remained unanswered.

  Annie’s affective life froze; she could do nothing but work and make her way up the office hierarchy. Two years after the kidnapping, a letter arrived in Anjou, at Annie’s father’s—undoubtedly because the two men had really gotten along rather well. It contained very little: a photograph of Fatima, who was nearly three years old, tall and thin, with brown hair, posing with her cousins. She was standing with the others seated around her as if they were attendants to the princess. On the back of the image, written in a painstaking hand, were the words, “Fatima is doing well. Is happy.”

  Idir hadn’t signed his name. He made a habit of sending another photograph for every one of Fatima’s birthdays. Sometimes they were blurry, cheap, with some new information: “Fatima is going to school.” And never a signature. Every time, in the same handwriting, the grandfather’s name and his address in Anjou were copied onto the envelope. “As if Fatima’s image can circulate only between these two men!” Annie sighed.

  The following years, she noticed—without commenting—that her daughter was positioned amid smaller children, three, then four. Fatima’s brothers and sisters, of course.

  In Algiers, as I wait for Annie to return, I wonder, “How did she make it through all of these long, empty years?”

  That past year, she had finally decided to take advantage of a Franco-Algerian legal protocol. First, she obtained visitation rights. Then, she hoped, she would be able to have her daughter for vacations!

  What had made her finally emerge from the impotent state that she’d let herself be paralyzed by for so long? My sister, who had been her friend all this time, spoke to me about it briefly on the phone.

  “You see, when she told me that she was learning Berber so that she would be able to communicate with her daughter one day, I was shocked, even disturbed, by this fact. We always talk about a ‘mother tongue’ that we lose and then reacquire (this is the case with me . . . Berber . . . to finally speak it like my grandmother, because my mother had cut herself off from it), but, you see, Annie is going to encounter ‘the language of the daughter’! The language not of her origins, but of her future—and now everything in her has started to come alive again!”

  So Annie leaves first for Constantine. From there, she takes a bus for a small neighboring city, meets with a lawyer who is waiting for her at his office. Then she sleeps in the city’s only hotel, where a room has been reserved for her.

  Idir’s brother, a young man with an open face and courteous manners, arrives in the morning at the lawyer’s office. In impeccable French, he tells her that her ex-husband refuses to see her again since she is going “through the authorities.”

  He goes away, then comes back an hour later. This time, he’s accompanied by a girl who looks no older than ten. The two men go out immediately, leaving Annie and Fatima in a sort of parlor.

  Silence. Annie’s eyes are wide. Her face betrays no emotion, and her hands extend just slightly to suggest not even a caress, but a hesitant gesture. The little girl’s face is long and delicate, her features delineated as if by a paintbrush, and her ardent gaze looks deeply into the stranger’s face.

  She speaks first. And in French! It was awkward, certainly learned in school. “What’s your name?”

  “Annie.”

  “Annie,” replies Fatima, who then repeats the name to herself, not entirely the way that this word has lived for so long in Annie’s heart: the i was not a French i; it was somewhere between the é and the i. Later, Annie would learn this pronunciation precisely.

  Hesitant—or, more likely, uncertain—Fatima resumes, “My father”—she says these two words proudly, which makes Annie happy—“my father, he doesn’t know that I know . . . They told me . . .”

  “What did they tell you?” murmurs Annie, her voice softening. She thinks about how, the day before, she had prepared words of love in Berber for her daughter in the dilapidated little hotel.

  Fatima won’t say it. How to let it out, confess it? The little girl wants to respond, she seems curious, but still reserved.

  “What did they tell you?” This time, Annie’s hands have reached out to Fatima’s shoulder. She doesn’t jump, doesn’t pull back.

  “The kids at school, the boys, they say that I have a French mother . . .” Suddenly, in a clear, incisive voice, “Is that you, the French lady?”

  The child doesn’t move. Her motionless features, the brown color of her forehead, almost tawny, her eyes a little blackened around their edges—the expression on her face is ambiguous—falsely indifferent or cold. And Annie is frozen, with insides that feel as if they were churning. She says nothing. She contemplates her daughter, her little one—not so little any longer.

  “Take her in my arms! Me, the French lady!” Annie thinks to herself. She holds out her hand, her fingers, wants to touch Fatima’s cheek. Fatima doesn’t move. But looks at her steadily.

  Suddenly Annie begins. She talks for a long time. A very, very long sentence to tell her, her daughter, the little girl who grew up alone and who sits up straight, with her stoic woman’s gaze like a sword in front of her, of her love, her suffering. Annie slips into this sentence where she gives away everything, the truth that she has just one little daughter, that she’ll never have any other children, that . . .

  She loses herself in her overly passionate words. Fatima is subjected to it like an avalanche, a torrent, a casting of little stones, not of caresses, no, not yet.

  Annie stops herself as she tells me the story of their first meeting, then, in another voice, continues, “It’s true, it was suddenly as if I had another voice, as if another were inside of me, a foreign woman, a stranger, perhaps me, or somebody who had died before, resuscitated through me, and so, another voice in me—the voice of a little lost girl—recited the Berber phrase learned the day before. Written at the hotel in the Latin alphabet, then in Tifinagh . . . The little sentence of love!”

  Annie pauses, takes a breath, then admits, “So Fatima was staring at me. She smiled at me, slowly—I would say mysteriously, like . . .”—she searched, then found—“like in an Italian painting of the Madonna!”

  Overwhelmed by the recent memory, she adds nothing more. I remain silent. I’m getting ready to go with her to the airport. She’s going back to France.

  Suppressing her emotion, Annie resumes, “It was marvelous! But, Isma, it was also so hard! I haven’t told you yet. Fatima, who to my surprise, spoke French and Arabic, and, of course, Berber . . . Fatima, at nine and a half, wears a black chador that falls to her shoulders . . . At this first meeting between us, I wanted her to show me her hair, and so for her to lift up that veil. I didn’t ask her right away, only when I sensed that it was nearing the time for us to part . . . It’s stupid. Silky or frizzy, black or red—what does it matter! But still, I so wanted to see her hair. To see it . . . She denied my request, and it was a refusal that she really considered, it truly came from her! . . .” Annie remembers, her features drawn by fatigue or suffering. “Over the course of our conversation, one thing shocked her. She told me about the fast that was just ending and which she—so young!—had just observed. She could get used to the idea of having a French mother, but not of having a mother who didn’t observe the Muslim fast. I tried to explain multiple religions and even those who can be ‘without religion.’ That cold gaze from the beginning came back! It’s because of that, I know it, that she didn’t want to lift her chador for me!”

  We leave for the airport. Annie counts t
he months that are left until summer. Her confidence is recovering, blossoming. Next summer, she’ll spend a whole month near Annaba. The two of them will get to know each other better; they will love each other, Annie and Fatima.

  In hugging me good-bye, Annie entrusts me with a letter to mail. “My Berber phrase in the two alphabets, which I ought to have left for her! Isma, do you think that her father will interfere?”

  I don’t have the time to reassure her. A minute later, and she would have missed her airplane, and her departure that day would have been even more difficult.

  I wave good-bye to her, her letter in my hand like a banner of war.

  —1995

  Félicie’s Body

  for Jacques

  I. ARMAND/KARIM

  1

  You arrive on a Monday morning in February, unconscious already. In the ambulance, I sit down next to my sister Ourdia, who’s come with you from Oran. I tell myself that this time you’ve come to die by my side, right under my eyes. But will you at least look at me, just once? Smile at me, maybe talk to me?

  The ambulance reaches the Hôpital Lariboisière, and we go to the ward where they’re waiting for you. During the half hour it takes the doctor and the interns for the initial examination, Ourdia and I stay in the hallway, frozen in our seats.

  Suddenly exhausted by the emotions of the voyage, Ourdia moves around in her seat. Nurses and staff come and go without a glance at her. She sighs impatiently. She’s the youngest of your daughters, Mman, and has always been the most excitable one.