by Assia Djebar
So we chat in the cafeteria, recalling your fondness for large dogs and your predilection for mascara wine. Félicie, it’s good talking about you like this, about your incorrigible faults, laughing in complicity with Ourdia! A revitalizing joy. A sign that hope is resurfacing.
We come back toward the pavilion of the hospital where you are staying. In the courtyard, the sun illuminates a flowerbed of the first shoots coming up. Because of you, my happiness has pirouetted back. I have just shared this past that Ourdia never knew. We walk lightly. It’s the middle of the afternoon and it’s calm in your room. Your respiration steady. The bottles, the jars . . . A violet perfume that lingers from my sister’s ministrations.
We are filled with you, both of us. I already dream of your recovering with me. I can see Ourdia bustling about around your bed at my home. You will be sitting up, indolent. You . . .
Prolonged silence. On the other side, Ourdia’s nodding off. I’m to your left, keeping watch, my eyes riveted to you, to your peaceful sleep. Ourdia has her back turned to the window. The day illuminates all three of us.
My sister struggles awake. I watch over you, Félicie.
Then “it” happens.
Mman rises, sits up. Turns her head to the left, toward me. A minute at least. Falls back all at once. Mman!
I find myself standing at your bedside again. I take your hand. Ourdia talks, screams, I don’t know what. She goes out into the hallway, comes back, calls the nurses. Confused noise surrounds us both.
I’m no longer alone with you in the room. But it’s happened. Because of the things I said to you all these days and days, I’ve drawn you to me; you looked for me, of course. Yes, you saw me. You attempted to respond to my fierce silence. I was in a chair to your left. Once you were sitting up, you turned toward me.
I didn’t stand immediately. I wanted to take your hand. I stared at your eyes: your pupils were veiled and still these hazel flecks, which don’t diminish the vividness of the blue, not at all . . . but . . .
I wasn’t certain about any of this, Félicie! I believed you would look at me, that you’d smile, that you’d speak to me, if only two or three words. But no. Engulfed by the fogs from your voyage without return, you tried to wrench away, to come back, to come back to me.
Suddenly you sat up, despite the tubes, the wires, the bottle of oxygen suspended above your head, all of the equipment surrounding the motionlessness of your body. Everything pitched, leaned, followed your body (the force that this deployed . . . to turn you toward me, to your left). You really sat up. Stiff. For at least a minute.
It’s me who entered another coma with the infinity of this minute. Me, immobilized, my breath suspended.
You turned your head to the left. I met your eyes.
O Félicie, this wound! This void, this trajectory! I searched the pupils of your eyes.
(In the past, a child, in the bed with you. I was searching your eyes and inspecting the hazel—almost honey-colored—flecks, just a fourth of them, with the rest, behind your pupils, a dark blue.
You were laughing then. I murmured, “They’re blue to me, your eyes; too bad about the flecks!” . . . Nobody, not one of your eight children, inherited this anomaly.)
For the second minute you remained sitting stiffly, like a doll, your head turned toward me, your gaze . . .
I truly had not foreseen this absence. In my silence, I’d called out for you to come back for me, a minute, an hour, a day—it didn’t really matter—and you heard me.
I hadn’t anticipated that you would rush to the surface this long minute, yet remain captive over there and here. And especially not that your gaze on me would be empty.
Your cloudy pupils looked for me as if it were night, perceived me to your left, so that you had to make a heroic effort. I was waiting, breathing shallowly, my entire soul pierced by the blades of your nongaze, hoping, second upon second . . .
Your head fell back onto the pillow abruptly.
Ourdia’s voice, her cry—what does it matter? I find myself standing again at your bedside, Félicie. I take your hand. Your hand . . . hot. Burning, even.
Without turning toward my sister, I command her with my other hand, “Be quiet! Stay calm!”
I don’t know if I shout out to her, “Silence!”
Your burning hand. Leaning over you, I waited, hoped, begged; again, your face of wax, again, your bulging eyes with translucent skin, eyelids lowered, again . . .
The nurses, the intern on duty. Ourdia’s agitation.
All at once I see myself in this crowded room. They’ve opened the window. Where to go? Your body, horizontal: now and forever. From now on, it’s me, the ghost, a living ghost, but a ghost.
“It’s over!” I cry.
Turning my head, I perceive Ourdia’s frozen face in a flash, her tearful gaze fixing on me. One of the nurses murmurs, “Leave us! Just leave us!” The only thing I remember about the one who spoke is the tone of her voice, which was gentle. She takes me, I think, by the hand.
“It’s over, Félicie!” Crazed, I repeat these words as I’m pushed discreetly toward the hallway.
I don’t remember how I end up in the courtyard, then in front of the entrance. Outside, on the sidewalk, I hear my steps resounding on the asphalt. “It’s over. I’ll never talk to you again because it’s over!”
How to keep from shouting myself hoarse, “It’s over!” in the Paris of my exile?
I wander in the Barbès district for an hour. At the Thieves’ Market, beneath the high vaults of the Métro, I notice as if in a dream the rhythmic rumbling of the trains above succeeding one after the other at regular intervals. I let myself be accosted by a vendor who offers me watches, another a camera, another . . . They immediately back away from me, one after the other, undoubtedly because of my empty gaze. They guess that if I tried to respond to them, no sound would come out of my mouth. They go away.
My mother is going to die here, next to me!
I’m alive in Barbès, and I hang out at the Thieves’ Market. But no, I find myself in Oran, at the periphery of the bad boys’ quarter next to the Petit Lac, where I bought my first pair of jeans. I hang out with the poor, or with the hoodlums, but over there!
I’m seventeen. At home, Félicie is waiting for me.
II. OURDIA/LOUISE
1
And why didn’t they just call me Louise or Louisa? Louisa would be better, because it reflects both of them, the French mother and the Algerian father. The two loved each other, and they never split up, not for a single day after their marriage. They argued because they loved each other. But with the eight children, they each had to see their offspring from their own side, in his or her language and in their religions, because what’s a first name, if not a matter of religion? Especially since Father died, I tell myself that it’s a little as if they had placed their sons and their daughters (as soon as we were born) on a frontier, a crest, a no-man’s land. All this with pretexts, excuses. Father, the practicing and pious Muslim, sincerely wanted to play the tolerant one. His admirers and his critics, as well as those who respected him, would say, “Since he lets his Christian wife attend Mass, why shouldn’t she also be allowed to choose the names for the children pulled from her womb?”
These questions about my mother!
The aunts, those who loved her and all of whom she in fact loved, spoke about her in front of me, the youngest of her little girls.
“She left everything behind for your father. Her country, her family.” They didn’t know that in the village, when Maman was no older than twelve, she’d been abandoned by her father. Yes, she’d left everything for love!
While those who’d comment on our life were married because their fathers or brothers had “given” them, Félicie, they’d resume, “gave up everything . . . for love! It’d be natural for the kids to belong to her, right? She’s the one who should have chosen the names, and in her language: they’re ‘her’ children!”
Maman never spoke of t
his. Even when, at the age of fourteen, I reproached her vehemently for it.
“While ‘Louise’ is my first name on my card and ‘Ourdia’ after, couldn’t you have simply chosen ‘Louisa’? That works for both of you, and at least my friends wouldn’t make fun of me at school!”
“But mon chou,” Maman would reply placidly, “I didn’t know. Nobody told me that ‘Louisa’ was an Arabic name!”
I continued aggressively, “And Kader? You named him ‘Jean,’ but ‘Jean,’ in Arabic, is ‘Yahia’! It’s in the Koran! . . . Couldn’t you have simply named him ‘Yahia’ and called him ‘Jean’?”
“Don’t lose your patience,” Maman said patiently. “They don’t explain this to you at city hall. They didn’t at the time of the French, and they don’t now in the time of the Arabs! With my diploma, I never knew what was in the Koran, much less that the Muslims recognize John the Evangelist!”
I was trembling with irritation. Maman caressed me, cajoled me, and added glibly, “First names, they’re only words, what’s the big deal?”
“You made us together, and it’s as if when we were born you told us, there, you’ve got two sides, two faces, two . . .”
She kissed me on my cheeks. “Complicated. So my youngest is the most complicated one? So what do you want me to call you?”
“I’ve told you a hundred times: not ‘Titi’ or ‘Kaki,’ none of these ridiculous nicknames that hack us up into little pieces! It’ll be Ourdia! Just Ourdia!”
“But Louise is first on your card!”
“No, I live in Algeria, and even if I go to France like Titi and Marie, I’ll always be Ourdia!”
And Maman didn’t call me anything anymore. Or just mon chou or ma chérie. It was like that for years.
After Father was buried, we came back to Oran and I moved in with her again. And one fine morning she called out to me, “Ourdia, ma chérie.”
I looked at her: Maman, my maman! She had pronounced my first name as if she spoke Arabic. She must have practiced a long time by herself before letting out this “Ourdia” for me—with the r rolled and the tonic accent on the i. It was a sunny spring morning.
I’m Félicie’s youngest daughter. All these years I’ve known that I’d be at her side, as with Father, that I would stay very close to her when she passed away.
2
With Karim gone yesterday after having shouted, “It’s over!” I stayed until nighttime along with the nurses. I gave Marie and Noureddine a call, and they came looking for me.
“Karim’s not doing well, not since Maman got up and looked at him, then fell back into the coma.”
“He was lucky to see her open her eyes again!” sighed Marie, blowing her nose.
Noureddine, who had gone to talk in private with the doctor on duty, returned, distracted. “He doesn’t think her chances are good!”
I said I wanted to spend the night there.
“That’s not possible,” ordained the head nurse. “Leave me your telephone number. Tonight, she’ll be checked on every hour. In case of an emergency, I promise that you’ll get a call!”
“We live fifteen minutes from the hospital,” Marie said reassuringly, and she led me toward the exit.
We left.
I slept very little. I got up twice to call Karim and talk to him, but I didn’t know if Claudine was still living with him. I didn’t want to wake her up.
Early in the morning, I got dressed hastily and recopied Marie’s work number. Filled with apprehension, I arrived at Maman’s side. She was sleeping. “An almost completely stable night,” the day supervisor confirmed, much to my relief.
And so the alarm from the day before turned out to be a false one. All that, because Karim had cried, “It’s over!”
And he hadn’t even arrived yet, and it was almost late morning. He must not have been as anguished as me last night. It’s just as well! Maman was right: I’m the most emotional.
I didn’t want to leave the room, even when the specialist came to examine her “as a matter of emergency,” his resident behind him huffing at me . . . And at two in the afternoon I got up, pricked up my ears. Maman’s breathing had just transformed into a kind of rattling, more of a gurgle. Not normal. My heart beat wildly. I pushed on the buzzer for somebody to come.
I didn’t know what to do. I let go of Maman’s hand, I walked around the bed. “What are they doing? They’re not here! This rattling . . .”
Karim returned at this moment of panic. He took one glance at me and then rushed forward. “Things are bad! She’s breathing poorly!” I stammer.
Suddenly, my brother, pale and rigid, his voice almost reproachful—and in Arabic, yes, in the Arabic language—exclaimed domineeringly, “Did you tell her the chahadda?”
I remained quiet. Within, I was falling from on high, plunging over a precipice. “My brother’s already thinking of death! Of Maman’s death!” Finally I answered, “Yes . . . I think so!”
As if I knew the chahadda! And what good would it do?
Karim approached, placed his ear against her sweet face, then he pulled himself back up. Standing upright, almost impassive, his hand holding hers. (Later, he’ll say, he’ll repeat, “Her hand was hot! It remained hot in mine!”) So, somber as a priest—as if he were no longer my brother, but someone else, more like one of my Father’s brothers—Karim looked at me dubiously, and then I heard him, the Parisian, pronounce the first verset of the fatiha—the first sura of the Koran—in impeccable Arabic: “In the name of God the Generous, the Merciful, attest that there is only one God and that Mohammed is the messenger of God!”
Then he was quiet, his hand in Maman’s.
I burst into tears in front of the pair: Maman and her son.
Titi surprised me for the first time at the moment Maman was exhaling her final breath.
For a minute there had been silence. Still sobbing, I ran into the hallway. “Maman is dying! Come, do something!”
I quickly came back to the room with two nurses; a third rushed to alert the intern on duty. Someone, a visitor or an employee, jostled me into the hallway and exclaimed loudly, “It’s three o’clock! Three o’clock in the afternoon!”
I reentered the room, dried my cheeks. Karim’s back was turned. He let Maman’s hand fall, then turned around. In a voice that was so low, so weary, he sighed, “She’s no longer suffering. Allah Akbar! (‘God is great!’)”
I lifted my eyes toward him; his face was sunken, his eyes glistening. There was a nervous tic in his jaw. Quickly, I thought to myself, “The minute I left, he let her die! Then he broke down, all alone! Broke down with grief!”
I went to the other side of the bed. I caressed Maman’s face. I wanted to get into the bed with her, take her in my arms like a child and rock her . . . But with all these tubes and connections, useless now, I didn’t dare! I took some eau de toilette and passed a moist handkerchief over her forehead, over the eyelids which would open no more, her straight nose, her mouth with suddenly pursed lips, her upturned chin. I leaned over and kissed her again on her two cheeks, on the forehead. “Her skin is still warm!” I lamented inwardly.
When the intern arrived for the final tests, I searched Karim’s face. He was sitting in a chair on the other side of the bed; he didn’t look at Maman. “He won’t look at her again,” I thought.
His features were still sunken. He no longer had the tic from before. It’s then that he met my gaze. In a desperate voice, he murmured, “Just before, when I got here, I didn’t want to come in! I took a walk around the hospital: a first time, a second . . . I didn’t want to come in!” There was a sob. “I would have arrived at least an hour earlier!”
I didn’t reply. If I smiled at him, I’d start to cry. No.
“Her hand in mine stayed hot!” he added.
I still didn’t respond. I stared him in the eyes, and then, finally, his face and his features relaxed!
Maman is still beside us, and now I know. I’m stronger than you, Karim!
III.
PALAVER
Having arrived two hours before from Oran, Younès, the last of Félicie’s sons, is able to attend the first family council, which is held the night after Félicie died. (Younès is actually a nephew Félicie and her husband adopted in 1962 when his father, among the first from Beni-Rached to go underground, was reported missing.)
Younès is bearded, displays an honest piety, and, contrary to what some family members believe, does not sympathize with the fundamentalists. But he’s definitely a successful businessman. He speaks French, Oranian and Moroccan Arabic, expresses himself easily in Spanish, and understands English. Doing import-export business between Europe and Oran, he’s a prosperous man, and everyone knows it: his neighbors, the villagers, all the relatives. Still, he’s one of the youngest of Félicie’s sons.
Everyone is at Marie’s; they invite him to sit down. Younès goes to kneel before the body of his adoptive mother. He’s braced himself and doesn’t cry. He opens his two palms, which he’s brought together in front of his face, and intones a few indistinct versets. He’s come to the gathering with Karim, who waits for him outside.
Marie and Ourdia are already there, plus their other brother Khellil, as well as Marie’s two sons, Noureddine and Mourad. Kader, one of Félicie’s youngest children, has stayed in Oran. He’s the one who could be called “the imam,” the expert in religious knowledge and in Islamic theology and who Karim just calls “the reverend.” He’s stationed himself by the telephone back home and can be called, over the course of the discussion, to garner his opinion . . .
Where should Félicie be buried? This is the first question. “Where” means: in Algeria or in France? Marie argues that in Paris, she and her sons could take care of her tomb, go there often to visit. “Those of you in Algeria have Father’s tomb! Here, we’d at least like to feel our mother’s presence, yes?”
