The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry

by Assia Djebar

  “What good timing. At home I have the right to make a gift to a new friend! What’s more, you’re leaving!”

  Just when I was suggesting to myself to compare my adolescence in Oran with yours in Paris, the years you worked at the Citroën factory!

  2

  It’s over. Félicie has left—yesterday on the morning plane. I called the Oran airport an hour ago. Everything went fine. The station manager, contacted by a cousin’s brother-in-law, properly conducted the little sleight of hand that had been planned, changing the sticker on the coffin identifying the deceased before it went through customs. According to her French identity card, she had left as “Félicie Marie Germaine,” these first names preceding her husband’s Arabic name, and one minute after landing on Algerian soil, she became “Yasmina Miloudi.”

  Ourdia and Younès, who had made the trip and were watching over the series of formalities, brandished the certificate from the little “Goutte d’Or” mosque, attesting that this believer’s body had indeed been washed according to the Malekite Sunni Muslim rite.

  In addition, Kader—the “imam”—had confirmation that she had pronounced the chahadda before entering the coma, signed by four witnesses. (After all, hadn’t I spontaneously pronounced it, the Islamic formula, just at the moment of Félicie’s passing?) A certificate to inter this recently converted French woman in territory belonging to the French prefecture, this document would appease all of those who came to the airport that morning.

  Over the phone, they told me that twenty family members (relatives and marriage relations) had welcomed Félicie’s body. Two or three relatives had even ululated, so that travelers passing through looked around for the young bride they were waiting for, and were not surprised to see that Oran was still “joyous,” despite the gloom and the dangers of current “events.”

  A number of bottles of perfume were poured out onto the coffin, attesting to the very recent first name of “Yasmina.” The procession then set off for Eckmul, where the first wake was to be held in the little apartment I know so well, where scarcely two months ago you’d come and go, parking yourself for long periods at your window.

  That night, Félicie, was the first of many without you—your last in Oran before you were taken away, this time with no return!

  Over the phone tomorrow, I’ll get the details of how the voyage transpired in three steps. First, some of the relations from the village who had insisted on coming to accompany “their” dead—the one they awaited, the one they loved.

  Then I’ll get descriptions of the second night of mourning, which will be an exceptional occasion in Beni-Rached. I will be told the number of people that had to be fed. On the men’s side, there’ll be maybe a hundred or more; on the women and children’s side, two or three times more, as usual.

  They’ll add the number of sheep whose throats had been slit, then eaten; the number of cooks; how many singers of the Koran. A party, yes, your final party, and it will take place (I had wanted it, insisted) at my father’s brother’s house—Si Salem—who is approaching his ninety-sixth year, with a wife, his third, thirty years his junior . . .

  Si Salem will feel honored at being chosen, despite his very small house, to preside over the funeral ceremonies for the roumia. Because it’s the beginning of the summer, he’ll have to set up ceremonial tents for the guests . . . some of whom, my father’s cousins, will be coming from far away (the Ouled Sidi Cheikh) and on horseback. I’m sure that when the procession reaches the village, they will give it a ceremonious escort. I know Si Salem will come out larger, even rejuvenated, from presiding over the ceremonies honoring his sister-in-law. He will be the one to host her, to receive benedictions and pious wishes, as well as gifts (of sheep, donations of money to contribute to the costs) . . .

  Remember, Félicie, you liked Uncle Salem. He came to our house in Oran just once. It was two or three years after the independence. Fifteen years older than my father, he was eager to talk to you, and he’d asked me to translate for you. It seemed that he wanted to demonstrate a particular courtesy to you, let’s say even a respect, despite your being a woman… but also a beautiful foreigner who had come from so far away—for your husband, of course, but also for the entire tribe!

  I remember everything my uncle said. You had listened with wide eyes. Later, you admitted that you had been very touched. (“It’s as if he had become my father. Or the father I should have had!”)

  “Translate my words to your mother,” the patriarch began, “so that she knows all about our lineage. I had a brother who was called up for the war against Germany, the first. In 1914, I myself was too young, but he, Omar, was of age . . . Mohammed, on the other hand, was only five. He wasn’t even circumcised yet.

  “Omar left on horseback, of course. He fought among the Spahis. He was reported missing at the end of the Battle of Verdun!” He got lost in thought, then resumed, “She can see how fortune worked for us. After the war, I was excused from service; there was still the draft, and I was lucky. I’d spent my entire life in the village watching over my father and my own. Mohammed did his military service in Algiers. He stayed in the army, left for France and—so it pleased God—he met you, thanks to whom his fate took a fortunate turn. For you came back to Algeria, and you stayed . . . In 1943 and 1944, he was no longer the right age to be called up. He was married with three children. If he had left with the other men to liberate France, Italy, to go to Germany, maybe he would have remained there on the battlefield!

  “But my youngest brother fought at Monte Cassino in Italy, then Alsace and Germany, and he did come back. His head was completely turned around and his heart was so bitter! He spoke only of ‘justice’. . .” Salem had shrugged his shoulders detachedly, pronounced a short Koranic formula that I couldn’t translate. “Naturally, your mother remembers that he was among the first to sign up with the maquisards in the winter of 1955 . . . because she’s the one who then wanted to bring up Younès, his son! . . . And then in 1962, on the night before July the 5th, they gave us the bad news: Mourad, who’d been my father’s favorite because his mother was the ‘Moroccan,’ his favorite wife, would not be coming back. The old man never got over this loss.

  “‘I gave one of them, the first, to France, I gave one of them, the last, to the Brothers! May God stand by me with his rhama. I suffer too much because of Mourad, especially because his body isn’t here, and we couldn’t bury him in a spot where I would have joined him!’

  “Remind your mother,” Si Salem had continued, emotional from reexperiencing his father’s grief, “that in 1962, my father was approaching ninety-five. She knows, and I’m telling her again, that my father (may God grant him peace) nearly went blind with crying.

  “It’s destiny! She should learn the details of her husband’s and his brothers’ history. For me, in any case, she turned up like a guardian angel for us, for the entire village!”

  Younès, so young at the time, was sitting near me. Sentence after sentence, I translated what Si Salem was saying for you, and you immediately asked me to respond to him, “Tell Si Salem that for me, he’s the older brother or the uncle that I never had as a child back in France!”

  Perhaps this episode motivated you to go “on vacation” the following summer, accompanied by Younès, a little boy of around twelve, just as I was getting situated in Paris with my secondhand boutique, my first business.

  I was pleased when you arrived. I quickly realized that you hadn’t come to sightsee. The third day you admitted, “I’m going with Younès to the village in Normandy, where my sister lives. We’ve just connected again.”

  I was surprised. I watched you leave. You, a beautiful woman just over forty, and little Younès, so brown, with green eyes.

  You came back four or five days later. You were taciturn, which was unusual for you, and gave me few details about Aunt Simone. Yes, you had been well received. Yes, you had both been moved! Yes, my aunt would visit when she came to Paris!

  Nothing else. But after
two days of shopping in the stores, you announced, “You know, Titi, I’m going back tomorrow! I miss Oran!”

  From this I concluded that you missed Father, whom you hadn’t spent a day away from since you’d been married. I was wrong. I had attributed the reserve—or, as they say in Arabic, “the shame”—of the nation’s women to you. However, you could have easily told me, confessing with your throaty laugh, “I’m longing for Môh, do you understand, Titi?”

  But it was Oran you missed: the city and the roar of it, and the spectacle of the streets, which you’d contemplate from your window, you the voyeur, the dreamer . . .

  You visited your sister in the Normandy village a few years after the independence. I was to learn the details much later, when Aunt Simone, herself a widow, started to travel and came to visit me in Paris on a regular basis. We would have lunch together; the vague—but definitely present—resemblance to you, her older sister, disturbed me. (She’s the only one with your eyes, with those hazel flecks that don’t mute the deep blue glittering of your irises.)

  So one day, Aunt Simone told me about when you returned to the village of your childhood. “Your mother came to my place with her son. The next day, she asked me to accompany her and Younès to the other end of the village, to the distant farm where our father lived with his new wife.

  “She left the little one in front of the gate. ‘Don’t go in!’ she cautioned. She turned to me. ‘I know that you see Father and even that you’ve forgiven him! But I’ve got things to tell him, and I prefer to do it in private . . . to get things off my chest! Please,’ she begged me, ‘stay with Younès. I won’t take long!’

  “She went into this rather ostentatious home. In contrast to when we were children, my father had become successful selling used cars.

  “She told me that there she was in the living room with the man, my father, whom she hadn’t seen for nearly thirty years! (Do you know, Armand, when our mother died and he abandoned us—all four of us—Félicie, the eldest, was twelve or thirteen, at the most! He had placed her as a maid with some middle-class people he knew in Le Havre. And we, the three little ones, were supposed to help.

  “Félicie didn’t let him talk. ‘I didn’t come,’ she told me, ‘to hear his justifications or his excuses. I made the trip all the way here to get something off my chest! I told him that I considered him a worthless father. Thank God, I hadn’t remained an all-purpose servant for foreigners! That I had been lucky enough to meet a man, a real man. That I was happy in my marriage and with my new family!

  “‘He sputtered. His wife appeared in the doorway with a plate and some glasses. I refused everything. I lifted my head. On the wall, above a chest of drawers, there was a group photograph, a little yellowed but in a nice frame . . . I realized that it was us, the four children, me barely ten years old in a flowery dress, and in the middle my poor mother, her face already thinner and her smile, so sad . . .’

  “‘“You see,” the heavy, red-faced man started, seeing me looking at the picture, “I haven’t forgotten you, not you or your mother!”

  “‘Suddenly seeing that he wasn’t in the group (he must have been the one who had taken the photo), I pulled up a chair. I stepped up and simply took down the photo.

  “‘With everything you’ve got here, with your success, I’ve been told, and even though you don’t have any other children, I don’t want anything when you die! Nothing, absolutely nothing. Disinherit me, I’m asking you. The only thing I’m taking today . . . is this!

  “‘And I left, the picture under my arm, without a glance at either the man or his wife, so unassuming!’”

  So Aunt Simone described the scene to me in a single gulp. Her large eyes far away, she added, “On the sidewalk, Félicie engulfed Younès in a frenzy, kissing him. She kept this picture, which she didn’t show us, under her arm. We went back on foot, crossing the little town. Félicie would rush forward . . . sometimes she’d be ahead of us, one hand in the boy’s, the other carrying the photo. From behind, I could see her back and her long hair, which would sometimes shudder suddenly, as if she were sobbing, but on the inside . . .

  “She didn’t leave the house the next few days. We sisters, finally reunited, didn’t stop talking . . . Félicie talked and talked. Especially about you, your father, Oran, and this village in the South. It was as if I had gone to where you lived and knew all of these places: the city of Oran, the farm, the warmth of the people . . .”

  Aunt Simone paused, breathed, then continued energetically, “Armand, I remember this detail that she told me about with . . . with what I believe was happiness. ‘In my working-class neighborhood,’ she told me, ‘when I go out, once a day at least, the kids in the nearby streets come up and greet me. They’re all happy to show me that they speak French (they still learn it in school, after Arabic).’ And Félicie laughed, then added, ‘They all call me “Mistress!” “Mistress!” You see, Simone, for them, if I’m a French woman, and I’m living among them, then they’re going to think that I’m a retired school mistress!’”

  Aunt Simone stopped her story. This time I spent the whole day with her. I love my aunt, and not only because she has your eyes, Félicie. And not so much because she’s the sister you reconnected after twenty-five years. I love her for her tenderness, more precisely her nya (as they said of you in the village)—this good faith which is a kind of benevolence, or a silent respect for others, for all people.

  Aunt Simone won’t return to Paris until tomorrow, after you’ve already left. Late this morning, after the village’s collective prayer, you’ll be placed carefully right next to my father’s grave.

  The words that Si Salem addressed to you back then, like a public tribute, stirred up so many digressions, so many things. They’ve brought me to a part of your life that you never talked about with me—not with me, not with any of your children. After meeting my father at the ball in Le Havre, you must have summed up your situation—if not the first day, then at least on the night you decided to get married as soon as possible—in this way: “My father abandoned me; I was just a little older than twelve. My employers must have his address. But I don’t want to have anything to do with him!”

  Not yet having reached the age of eighteen, it was urgent to obtain your father’s permission so you could get married. Your bosses took care of it. “They’re good to me!” you had said, sad to learn later that they had all died in a bombing.

  Here, your first sufferings rush back to me in these scenes that I start to reimagine, both because of Si Salem (at whose house you’re now sleeping, your final night, amid the villagers’ litanies and discussions) and also because of Aunt Simone, whom I’ll be welcoming tomorrow. Whose eyes I’ll contemplate.

  3

  Uncle Salem had brought up this independence day, July 5th, when he and his father received confirmation that Younès’s father, Mourad, had died.

  The course of events from that day comes back to me: marchers’ songs, effervescent parades, a joyous fever all throughout the country . . . Everywhere except in Oran, where the tragedy was then hidden like a disgrace.

  I was only twenty. Anguished as I was by the mounting unrest, my memory of this day remains gray and foggy. This July 5th and the days after!

  Because I was increasingly afraid that you had died, Félicie. And today I’m becoming reacquainted with this leaden anguish from then, with this desert of the soul.

  You disappeared rather early the morning of this July 5th. I would have liked to have accompanied you to the “outdoor party.” But you mischievously suggested, “Maybe it would be better for you to go with kids your age?”

  I was already friends with Brahim, “the black guy.” You looked at us both indulgently. You were nicely dressed. You left abruptly, exclaiming, “I’m going to see how people celebrate this great day—I’ll be back in an hour or two. I won’t be longer. Tell your father, Titi!”

  We weren’t living in the tribunal apartment anymore. Since the daily threats by the OAS—espe
cially from the Delta commandos—had started, we had sought refuge in a rather simple home in the “new city” among the Muslims.

  Félicie went out joyfully. I heard the wooden high heels of her shoes resonating in the stairwell. She seemed like a little girl who was rushing off much too early for a ball scheduled for the evening.

  The evening arrived quickly, in fact, and she hadn’t come back yet . . . Meanwhile, two hours after she’d left, we heard the first gunshots, which seemed to set everything off: the tragedy and its horrors had arisen to slowly darken the center of the city. This was around noon.

  Oran and the murders. A somber conclusion to the past year, when assassinations had succeeded one another, day after day—the difference being that the killers had changed sides. After months of “Arab hunts” being conducted systematically, one day vengeance stepped in. From whose side? From the underground, or those recently freed from prisons one or two months before? They had opened the doors for political prisoners, but also for common law ones!

  Right after March 19, I encountered many who simply put on a brand-spanking-new uniform and presented themselves as “maquisards,” as “liberators,” as “combatants.” After this hypocrisy and its play-acting, the same parade was now preparing itself for a terrible danse macabre!

  On July 5th, I said this to myself, but it was just a vague abstraction. Though still naïve, I knew how to distinguish the “real” from the “false.” I could tell the actual participants from the pretenders or the disguised traitors. I’m not sure whether I recognized it by instinct, or when there was something excessive and unconvincing in the word play made by a self-proclaimed ‘Oranian.’ This formed the main basis of my conversations with Brahim, my initiator. He was silent about his past, and often smiled scornfully at these new braggarts and blowhards.

  With their “burned land” policy almost having been carried out to completion in our accursed city, the OAS hardliners, these demons slipped away in an in extremis escape to the nearby Spanish coast. They had only just left when those who had been their slaves yesterday, their pseudoenemies, bared their wolfish maws!