Hope and Despair

by Monia Mazigh

  We had been in Tunisia for three months now. I had come with the children in June, Maher had joined us a month later. It was our first vacation in years. Although my parents were living in Canada and I saw them often, I never saw my brother or my uncles and cousins any more. For Maher, business in Canada had been rocky. I was still on maternity leave; it was as though we had come to a crossroads. So we had decided to take a little step back and think about our plans for the future. Our vacation in Tunisia would give us an opportunity to reflect on our eight years together and what we hoped to do in the years to come – 2001 had not been a good year. The high-tech bubble of the late 1990s had burst, the whole sector was beginning to suffer. It was as though investors were waking up from their long, sweet dream to find reality staring them in the face. In Ottawa, each day seemed to bring new layoffs. Maher’s friends or former colleagues were being let go, the list of the qualified unemployed was growing longer. Like most people, we expected the high-tech boom to go on forever; the boomerang didn’t hit us at first. In early 2001, after two years of shuttling between Boston and Ottawa, Maher had left The MathWorks, the American company for which he had been working as an engineer, but the vice-president suggested that he work on contract from Ottawa. We were in seventh heaven. Life was good in Ottawa. The cost of living was reasonable and Maher was earning a good salary in American dollars; we couldn’t have hoped for anything better.

  But the events of September 11, 2001, turned everything upside down. I’ll never forget that day. I was finishing my breakfast in the kitchen of our Bayshore house. Barâa was playing beside me. I was listening to the radio when the announcer said that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. He talked about it as an event merely of note; no one realized its gravity at that point. I switched off the radio, not knowing that in the minutes to come the eyes of the whole world would be riveted on New York. That day I had intended to go to the University of Ottawa library. I was working as a research assistant for a professor in the Department of Management and needed to consult certain books. Maher was on yet another trip to the United States with a fellow MathWorks employee, presenting one of the company’s software packages to a San Diego firm. Minutes later, the telephone rang. It was Maher calling from his hotel room. His colleague had just awakened him and told him to switch on the TV. A devastating attack had just occurred in New York. We were in shock. As more information became available, the name of al-Qaeda surfaced as the terrorist organization responsible for the attack. By midday, all the television and radio commentators were talking about Muslim terrorists. Maher called me again, warning me not to go alone to the library: “Your head scarf will be like a red flag; right now, there’s a lot of anger against Muslims…” I didn’t change my plans and went to the library that day. But, behind the wheel, I was tense: Maher’s words were ringing in my ears. I kept the car doors locked, worried that someone was going to jump me. But nothing happened. Yet the days and months that followed the attacks introduced a new atmosphere into our lives, one of suspicion and fear. Both of us had fled a repressive regime to settle in Canada. Many times, with our own eyes, we had seen the spectre of fear hovering over our family, and over the Arab-Muslim community.

  Still, we didn’t change our way of life. Maher continued with his work, I continued with my research project. But outside our home, we sensed a feeling of creeping distrust. It was as if we had to take every opportunity to show our loyalty to Canada and its democratic values. It was not enough to have chosen to live here, speak the language, send our children to school, pay our taxes, get along with the neighbours, respect the laws, vote in elections, do no harm to others: more was expected of us. Relations between Muslims and non-Muslims were increasingly tinged by a kind of awkwardness that was hard to dispel. Schoolchildren named Osama and Mohammed were often singled out, and racist remarks were frequent; it was no longer rare to hear it said that all Muslims were terrorists. But for the most part, Canadians’ reactions were polite and more discreet. In the United States, things were worse:

  “The American administration has required 80,000 non-citizens to be fingerprinted, photographed and registered, simply because they come from Arab or Muslim countries. A further 8,000 young men from the same countries have been summoned by the FBI for interviews and another 5,000 other non-citizens have been placed in preventive detention,” wrote David Cole and Jules Lobel in Less Safe Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror (2007).

  However, two incidents occurred in our lives that had a direct impact. The first took place on December 20, 2001. Maher was returning from a business trip to Boston. As usual, he had taken his MathWorks laptop computer and his PalmPilot. When he arrived at Canadian customs, the customs officer began to rummage through Maher’s belongings. Then she questioned him about his religion and his trips to the United States. She seized his computer and PalmPilot, telling him that he would have to pay customs duties on them. The computer was not his, he explained; he had bought the PalmPilot more than a year earlier when he was living in Boston. She would hear none of it, then took both away and asked him to wait until an evaluation had been done. Maher could not believe it. He called me from the waiting room and told me not to worry. He had no idea what was going on. When, later that day, he was finally authorized to leave the airport, he was not given back the two devices. Instead, he was given a receipt and told to come back and get them the next day.

  That incident upset us deeply as a case of racial profiling. We didn’t know at the time that intelligence agencies in both countries had begun to watch Maher closely. We attributed it to the multiple repercussions of 9/11 on the Arab-Muslim community. Canada was not the United States, of course, yet we could feel the vise tightening around us. We continued to live normally, but I became more and more aware that people were looking at me. I had worn a head scarf since my student days at the Institut des hautes études commerciales in Carthage, before immigrating to Canada. I had never explicitly felt racism against my person before, but now the way people were looking at me had changed from curiosity or ignorance to mistrust and suspicion. For us, the airport incident was the end of the honeymoon. Our marriage with Canada had been consummated; but now, hard reality was looming ahead of us. We could see it coming, but to maintain an appearance of normalcy, we tried to put it out of our minds. After the incident, Maher had made up his mind to seek advice from a lawyer. Michael Edelson’s name was suggested to him, but – as always happens after a few days have passed – our anger began to fade and we put it out of our minds. Maher didn’t go to see the lawyer.

  The second incident was something else again. I was pregnant with Houd at the time; the baby was due in a few weeks. Maher had gone to Tunisia to attend to my father, who had returned to Tunisia for several months and had fallen quite sick. My brother, Mourad, could not stay with my father constantly on account of his work, and for me to travel this late in my pregnancy was out of the question. We decided that Maher would stay with my father until his health improved. Maher was scheduled to return to Canada in a few days. I was suffering from insomnia and spent most nights sleepless. Early one morning I began to doze off at dawn. Around seven o’clock, just as I was enjoying a little rest, I heard knocking at our door. I couldn’t believe my ears. I thought I was dreaming and tried to go back to sleep. But the knocking resumed, more insistently, so finally I decided to get up. Eyes still bleary with sleep, I put on my housecoat, went downstairs, and opened the door. Before me stood two men. One faced me directly, while the other was a pace behind. The first was tall, wore a trench coat, and had piercing, icy-blue eyes. The other was slightly plump and seemed pleasant enough. The blue-eyed man showed me his federal police officer’s ID. I took a step forward, trying to figure out what was going on. I thought I was sitting in front of the television watching an American detective movie. He asked me where my husband was. In Tunisia, I explained. The man wanted to know why he had gone there and when he intended to return. His questions came in rap
id succession. He was obviously well prepared. His small eyes stared at me haughtily; again and again I felt ill at ease. There I stood with my bulging belly, my head scarf thrown over my head, my sleep-laden eyes, in a green housecoat with a bright red motif, answering questions from a plainclothes police officer. The scene was tragicomic. Finally, the second officer stepped forward to tell me there was nothing urgent; they only wanted to ask my husband some questions. They handed me a card with a telephone number, which I promised I would give to Maher and he would contact them. I closed the door and went back inside.

  What was happening to us? Why was the RCMP interested in my husband? We had never had any problems with the police. To my way of thinking, we were a law-abiding family, an educated immigrant couple seeking our path in life. Never had I doubted my husband’s honesty. I believed in him and wanted to help him so that we might succeed together. The early-morning arrival of these two police officers, with their suspicious, probing manner, had shaken me. I phoned Maher immediately and recounted the incident, gave him the police officer’s name and number, and asked him to follow up. He called him and left a message.

  A few days later, Maher returned from Tunisia. This time, he had made up his mind to speak to Michael Edelson. At their meeting, Edelson informed Maher of his rights; he would speak to the officer himself and find out what he wanted. The officer, he learned, wanted to ask Maher some questions in connection with an RCMP investigation. Edelson said he would accompany Maher to the interview. Since that day, we heard nothing more about the investigation, or from the police officers. The case was closed, or so we thought. Little did we realize that, in fact, our troubles were only beginning. In the first months after the officers’ visit, we wanted to put aside what had happened by blaming it on the current climate of fear. Still, I would hear stories of people losing their jobs because of their religion, and visits by intelligence agents to certain people’s workplaces were increasingly frequent. But as always, I felt sheltered from these dangers, as if they only happened to others.

  Maher’s business was not doing well. I had just given birth to Houd and would not be looking for work for the coming months. We decided to give up the house we were renting in Bayshore, move into the small apartment Maher had been renting for years for my mother and that he used as an office when he needed peace and quiet, and go to Tunisia for a two-or three-month holiday. It would not be a luxury vacation, but it would give me a chance to visit the country I had not seen for ten years, and allow us both to reflect calmly on what lay ahead.

  SEPTEMBER 26, 2002. The day after Maher’s departure from Tunisia, I did almost nothing worth mentioning. In the afternoon, I took the children to the shopping centre near the family home. Across from it, the city had transformed a large vacant lot into a park. It was not like parks in Canada, with lots of greenery and trees. But it did have a big pool with fountains in the middle. The ground was covered with paving stones, dotted here and there with beds of little plants or patches of grass. There were also small concrete benches. I liked this place because there were usually other children about. Barâa could ride her bicycle and I could push Houd in his stroller without worrying about cars. I would sit and watch people around me, lost in my thoughts. Before, the area had been empty land. I had walked across it many times to take the bus or go to the shopping centre. The hardest was in winter when drenching rains would descend on Tunis and turn the field, and others like it, into a morass of sticky brown mud that clung to our shoes and spattered our clothing. There was none of that now; the place was clean and well maintained. After spending part of the afternoon in the park, I went home with the children. They were cheerful and happy.

  That evening I planned to wait up until around one o’clock in the morning to speak to Maher. The children were already in bed. I stayed with them a while, then when I felt they were well asleep I went into my old bedroom to lie on the bed and read. I kept many of the novels I used to love in a small bookcase. I picked up The Citadel by A. J. Cronin, in a French translation. I had discovered this Scottish author when I was sixteen and had read many of his books, translated into French. I felt like immersing myself once more in a universe that brought me back to those marvellous years when, heedless of the world around me, I would spend hours reading.

  The hours flew by, but the telephone didn’t ring; it was now two o’clock. I couldn’t sleep. I put down my book and went into the other bedroom. The children were slumbering peacefully. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. Why had Maher not called? Had he missed his flight? Which flight could it have been? The one for Zurich, for New York, or perhaps for Montreal? I wanted to telephone my mother-in-law in Montreal, but I didn’t want to create a panic. I decided to wait. There was no question of sleep. I tossed and turned on the bed, longing for the sun to rise then and there. I was tired, thoughts whirled in my head like a merry-go-round; I wanted to stop them, but as soon as I grasped them they would escape. Suddenly I saw Maher before me, angry and unsmiling. I asked why, but he didn’t reply. I wanted to go to him, but he vanished.

  I opened my eyes; the room was bathed in daylight. My head was heavy. I had slept only two or three hours. I went into the living room. The telephone was still there. I picked up the receiver to make sure there was nothing wrong with the line. I heard the buzzing of the dial tone; everything was normal. Maher had not called me. Why, why? I kept asking myself.

  Had something happened to him? Was he sick? In hospital somewhere? Impossible. He was in good health; he hadn’t complained of anything before leaving. Had someone hurt him, tried to rob him? In that case, I would have known; he would have called here in Tunis. Could he have been arrested in the United States? After all, the Americans had just introduced new security measures for non-citizens entering the country. All day long I stared at the telephone. There were times I thought I heard it ringing; I would run to pick up the receiver. It was only my imagination. I wanted to call my mother-in-law, but I decided to wait. I didn’t want her to worry. Her health was fragile and she was especially fond of Maher, the youngest of her six sons. After all, what could I say to her? Did Maher arrive yet? She knew he was coming back to Ottawa, but he had not told her when; he wanted to surprise her. My own mother was in Ottawa. She knew that Maher was due soon, she was waiting for him to telephone, but I didn’t want to call her either. It was as if I was ashamed to tell her that I hadn’t heard a word from him.

  Around midday I made up my mind to call my brother. I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. I was almost going out of my mind. His first words were:

  “So, did Maher call?”

  My voice was trembling, I felt like crying but couldn’t.

  “No,” I replied.

  “What? Where is he? What happened?” Mourad asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he missed his plane. He’ll certainly call me tonight, don’t you think?” I said as if to reassure myself. I had the feeling that Mourad was trying not to alarm me; he tried cracking jokes:

  “Well, maybe he decided to stay in Switzerland, it’s so beautiful there.” Mourad had lived in Switzerland and really liked the country.

  I tried to smile but couldn’t. My heart was heavy; never since we were married had I felt as alone as at that moment. Maher travelled constantly and I often stayed home. But this time was different; there was silence and uncertainty. I had no idea where he was. Barâa was in the living room. She was pretending to play, but I knew she had been listening to my conversation with Mourad, she understood everything. She was very mature for five and a half. When I hung up, she said:

  “Baba must be in a hotel. Maybe he doesn’t have enough money to call us.”

  “Yes, maybe,” I replied evasively, “but I’m sure he’ll call us this evening.”

  I didn’t know why, but it was as if I had set an imaginary deadline in my head. If Maher didn’t call this evening, it would mean that something serious had happened. I didn’t want to think too much about what “something serious” might be: arrest
, death, kidnapping … all kinds of horror-movie scenarios unfolded before my eyes. Each time, though, I would shake my head to blot out those images and remind myself that soon the telephone would ring and I would hear the music of his voice.

  I had trouble falling asleep that night. I would sleep a little, then wake with a start. I got up, sat on the edge of the bed, listening for the sound of the ringing telephone. Nothing. It was the noise of passing cars fading quickly into the night. Tired as I was, I no longer felt like sleeping. I wanted to wake up and talk to someone. I wanted to share my fear, my pain, and above all my feeling of helplessness. Was my husband dead? Was I to be a widow with two young children? What should I do, who should I contact, talk to? With a heavy head I fell asleep again and dreamed dreams I couldn’t understand. Was I slowly, surely slipping into hell? I saw myself ill, gaunt, walking straight ahead, alone. I got to my feet, got ready for prayer, and prayed. At first not a word came to my lips; it was as if I’d suddenly been struck dumb. Then I felt release, and my tongue loosened. Now the words flowed like an endless monologue. Sitting upright, kneeling, resting on my heels, I groped toward the light.