So Vast the Prison (30 page)

“A prince! You have been granted a prince, you, your mother’s princess!” the closest neighbor exclaimed, the one people considered the most eloquent both on happy occasions and for bereavements.

Two months later Bahia carried the baby in her arms as she left. Enveloped in a silk veil, she took the bus with her husband to the Sahel village where my father had just been named the “teacher of a class for natives.”

Where was I during this first trip? I certainly have no idea. My mother has no memory of it. It seems most likely that my father carried his little girl in his arms.

“Unless you walked at eleven months. Then you would have trotted along beside us to the bus stop.”

My mother does remember how much care she took to protect the baby in her arms: hiding his face, keeping him safe from the dust!

“Also from the evil eye!” the grandmother had advised her.

That is how the four of us entered the French apartment where I lived until I was ten, except for summers and the winter and spring vacations. Then we used to take the bus (later we would go in our own car) to the old city. To us, my mother and me, it seemed a haven, a cocoon: and my magical child’s memory turned it into a place of constant celebrations where gentle, languid women seemed to laze around.

When we lived in the apartment, we felt we were “among the French.”

“That is,” my mother explained to her friends when we would go back, “French people from France!” The teachers’ families all come from France. They say hello to us; I even learn a few words from our neighbors … (
What an experience!
the friends think, curious) “But the
others, the Europeans who live in the village, it’s like here: They have their world and we have ours!”

So, in the apartment building meant for teachers with families, we touched the fringes of another realm that was entirely strange for people from Caesarea: “the French from France.” Needless to say, in that village, we, my mother and I, were within a hair’s breadth of touching almost another planet.

“I have two languages,” says the mother orphaned for twenty years.

“Orphaned” that is, having lost her first son.

I hear this moan later, many years later: “I have two languages!” Twenty years after it happens the mother travels across France. In Strasbourg, in the hotel where she sleeps, where she cries herself to sleep, she awakens in the middle of the night. Does not turn on the lights. Opens her eyes and looks. Remembers? So far away from her imprisoned son whom she only saw for an hour, far from the Algeria she left in reckless daring, looks back on her days in the distant past, looks.

The baby in the apartment: when she crossed the threshold, her first son in her arms, under all her numerous veils. And she talks; she talks to me:

“He was six months old … In the village, it was just before the beginning of the holidays when we would leave for Caesarea. My mother-in-law lived with us, she was rather shy, and even uncommunicative; she knew so well how to rock him at night before he dozed off and very early in the morning, to let us sleep. She leaned over the cradle.

“I still hear the baby’s prattling; he had burst into a long bird cooing and then a chirping. The grandmother burst out laughing; I had never seen her that way, so excited. ‘Do you hear, my daughter: He just spoke in Berber!’

“And seeing my doubt, she insisted, ‘I promise it’s true! Of course, words just one after the other, almost bits and pieces. No one constant meaning … but it was Berber!’

“I shrugged my shoulders. I left the room. I regret doing so now, because he is not here anymore—the six-month-old baby (how could he have spoken Berber, not a syllable of it was spoken in our home … As for the village nurse, she came to us when my second son was born). And I feel remorse because of her, my mother-in-law; because she is now dead and because, except for this scene, I do not believe there was any point at which I failed her … she was sweet. When I was brusque with her that day, it must have hurt her.

“So we went to spend the vacation in Caesarea. In the middle of the worst dog days of this scorching summer he became sick, my baby; one Friday night … And before the end of the next morning he was dead. In just a few hours he had become completely dehydrated … The French doctor muttered, ‘You should have awakened me during the night!’ Dead and buried the same day, my baby! The language was smothered with him, I know. He went into the earth with his mouth open; fingers spread wide on his hands, and his eyes … His eyes, I still wake up at night and see them, I stare into their blue!”

My mother did not want to go to his grave. Even after the third day. She would not go back to the cemetery except for the funeral of Lla Fatima, her mother, who died a week after independence!

Salim, the son still living, has only just gotten out of the French prisons. First, however, he has to spend some time in a sanatorium—his lungs weakened in his last prison in Rouen, where he spent too much time in solitary confinement. (The only memory I share with my mother of her many trips to the French prisons: a day in 1961 when, the three of us, my mother, my young sister, and I, all went to
the prison. The director, who received us in his office, his cold gaze fixed on this lady flanked by her two young daughters, told us that Salim would remain “in solitary” after his failed attempt to escape).

No, even in the summer of 1962, when we are all going to spend some time in prayer—“the day of women,” always on the third—at the grandmother’s grave, even then the mother does not go to where the dead child lies. She will not come with us and admire the view of the whole city spread out quadrilaterally above its ancient port, now half under water, marked by its easily identifiable lighthouse, because she does not want to believe he is buried—buried since 1938. He would be twenty-four, fifteen months older than Salim.

Why go back over this sterile, blackish crust of a bereavement she formerly refused? Probably because before and along with the six-month-old baby taken away too soon, as if cruelly kidnapped, she first buried the language above all. She first buried the language that, for that first son, could have been a wreath of orange blossoms!

Unless this forgetting, this refusal, this denial had already come once long before when, at the age of six, she lost her voice when Chérifa, the all-beautiful, died. Unless, in this autism that went on so long, in the paralysis of her mouth, her throat, her vocal cords that reached even as far as the throbbing of her lungs—breathing in, breathing out—the language vanished into thin air. The language of the father who preferred to remain at the
zaouia
up in the mountains, the language of the sharecroppers who used to come with their accounts to the woman in charge, Lla Fatima, this language the little girl had wanted to turn away from, all at once was gone—within her, around her.

And the dead child remained entombed in her memory forever, the sleeping child.

SECOND DAY OF FILMING
 … Up to this point I have only discussed the location, the farm, and its queen who was absent for the nineteen members of the crew: the Madonna.

This is the day we move on to the final zoom: the camera circles the woman whose sleep now seems disturbed. The problem of the child’s bed in the background comes up: The head of the little girl sleeping there shows, but Ferial, the child intended to play the part, will only arrive from the capital the next day.

I go into the peasants’ house, where the children are still all excited about our beginning to shoot the film. The first house, we are told, belongs to the “widow”; I go inside and quickly choose a dark-headed little girl about Ferial’s age. I explain that all she has to do is sleep for maybe two or three hours in a child’s bed that is all prepared. All that will be seen in the picture is a tuft of black hair. I take little Aichoucha by the hand and lead her onto the set. The work goes faster, the technicians bustle around, it is ten o’clock, we are going to work until midnight; outside there is mud and cold, but the scene inside the brilliant spotlights is one of a sweetness that is half crudely unpolished and half carefully chosen, a feminine childhood intimacy.

I do not let go of the kid’s hand and, in spite of all the noise, talk to her softly. Near the little bed (one brought from my mother’s house, the bed in which her three children slept), I take off Aichoucha’s shoes, which the widow had insisted she wear. Her feet, alas, are still covered with mud, too bad! There is no time for us to wash them for her (whereas maybe that, in fact, would be the real poetry, the shepherdess with muddy feet washed under the spotlights).

I pick up Aichoucha, put her down in the bed with the white sheets that will now get stained; forget that detail, the child’s eyes fill me with emotion, I stroke her and whisper to her that she should really go to sleep, we only need her dark curls on the pillow. The shot begins.

Aichoucha, an eight-year-old shepherdess, the other indisputable beauty of this place. I met two queens here: the absent Madonna and the little shepherdess who is our first extra. Later she will become more and more present, but in silhouette, running after her sheep.

I return to my abrupt entrance into the cabin that night. Nine o’clock: no oil lamp, no candle; somebody brings a light. I catch sight of the mother’s face, still young, with huge eyes, and a swarm of children hanging on to the folds of her baggy pants. Aichoucha, whom I take with me, has the same eyes as her mother: large, slightly round, fastening you with their slow, ceaseless gaze …

The next day I insisted on going back so that they would offer me coffee and I could sit in the midst of the little family and spend some time with them.

The widow is thirty-two or thirty-three, maybe less, she does not know her exact age. Because she is tired and worn out, she seems already old, but her brow, her gaze, are those of an adolescent.
Despite the morning sun outside, the cabin is immersed in shadow; the furniture is rudimentary: a Berber chest, a few pieces of pottery, a charcoal-burning
kanoun
, a few sheepskins, and yet also two scraggy, Western-style chairs that are too high. Seated on one of them while the children scattered on the mat stare at me, I drink the coffee; I protest that they should not have begun to make bread on my account; above all I listen. Moments later, warm bread in my hands, Aichoucha like a cat at my feet, I listen to the mother’s story.

She relives the day her husband died: he was in charge of maintaining the machines at the cooperative. She describes the cause of the accident—a truck, apparently, whose brakes failed; she tells me how she got the news, shouted over the fields. She gives the details, the weeping, the family, the neighbors; there is only one essential word of comfort after all that: insurance.

This key word—spoken like a Frenchwoman—is still her hope and her despair: The formalities have dragged on for almost three years. The five children are growing up; the eldest, a fourteen-year-old boy, is the only one who goes to school, but their misfortune has made him the head of the family. He is employed as an apprentice from time to time, his daily salary, at half-pay, provides some income in addition to the meager support paid by the cooperative while they wait for the insurance to come through.

It surprises me to learn that none of the other children goes to school: The farm and its neighboring cabins are on the border between two districts. For our project we dealt with the community council in Tipasa: They have an active president and have energetically attacked the problems of schooling in the remote mountain hamlets that are geographically dependent on this district. All the children, including girls up to the age of fourteen (the real revolution in this rural society), are able to take the school bus free of charge.

But these houses, just two kilometers away from this district, are in an area where no such public service is guaranteed. With the very concrete result: This widow, whose resources are pathetic, is unable to pay two dinars a day per child for the bus that would take them to school. In other places, I will find out, the transportation fees can be waived for boys; for the girls there are only a few families, and not necessarily the most well-to-do peasants, who can bring themselves to pay.

Aichoucha consequently does not go to school.
What is the point of our being here?
I suddenly say to myself this morning.
Are we just going to move in for as long as it takes to expose enough film footage?

I hear myself explaining the modest pay for extras provided for in our estimates, but why not use the boy, the “head of the family,” as an assistant? I take some more coffee and say nothing more. Did I really come last night like a shadow thief for this child with the eyes of a doll and muddy feet?

Two days later I find out by chance that the technical crew has taken up a collection to cover part of this period while the widow waits for the insurance, and that she insisted on making couscous for them for the lunch break. I only learned the details of this exchange of favors by accident when someone kept insisting that I taste this couscous that, he said, “was a good sign.”