Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

“Let’s go!” I whisper, in a final gesture of caution.

I follow him to the garage, I sit down next to him, and I think once again that the trip will last all night long; that we are leaving, that’s all. That nothing will be over.

Together we two return in a silence that envelops everything, even the engine’s purr. In the middle of the trip, to have some music, I push a button.

“John Coltrane! ‘Naïma’!” I say as the music plays, becoming the only reality we have.

The car stops in front of the second door of the building where I live, near the tall palm and the ash trees. The concierge and his two grown boys, squatting on a step: their stares bore into me, the lady who at ten in the evening has herself calmly brought back home where, upstairs, the husband and children, already in bed are waiting. “Today the order of things is upside-down!” the fierce doorkeeper will say behind my back, and one of his strapping youths will spit to the side. At the moment the concierge is standing ceremoniously erect and waiting for the car to leave.

Though conscious of the hostility of these guardians of suspicion, up to the last minute I remain absorbed only by the presence of the man at the steering wheel, who is smiling at me. His eyes glisten. Our fingers brush together in the car; not one word is murmured before we part. I know that he is amazed now that, during the entire evening, as well as during the time we sat there before the twilight on the beach, nothing, in the end, happened between us!

Does he really say these ordinary words? Or did he just think it in the abstract? I feel it vaguely in the somewhat amused, indulgent look he gives me and a diffuse tenderness — which has nothing to do with the changeable fabric of the turmoil I am managing to hide.

So I smile at him at the last minute, happy to strengthen our secret bond, our mutual attraction whose rhythm is so different for each of us. I am afraid of the wave that might sweep me away, hence preoccupied with building a dam against it. He — I understand in this moment of goodbye — nonchalantly letting the things that began to be detected between us sweep over him: the comings and goings of my capricious dance around him, his house, the days of respite, the lazy days. He is, in short, passively preparing to wait for me. “When, finally, will you really be close? I wanted to dispose of yesterday’s tumult and reveal my history to you just so you would know that everyone has a turn at experiencing intoxication and passion, no matter how he or she resists. Everyone goes through the mill. Everyone, even you! Let yourself go! Come, come softly! I’m making no demands and I’m not pushing you; I’m simply waiting for you!”

Was this what he was preparing to tell me when he was done confiding on the beach? I put all this together — or invented it — after I left him, after his car took off, and after I had been followed by the stares of the concierge and his two sons, the watchmen of bourgeois respectability.

In the elevator, my eyes shut, I say to myself, He gave me that slightly surprised look, as if I were his younger sister, always behind, still paralyzed by taboos . Yet it was a tender look, and I got his message: I’m waiting for you! You’ll take the time you need. I’m waiting!

But then I did not take the time. No.

His love for this Frenchwoman, five years earlier.

“I was settling down in this country again, after studying in England. My father paid for that, one advantage of being an only son!” he said, half apologizing. “I still wasn’t doing much; I was twenty-five, without a girlfriend or even a fiancée in reserve for me among the cousins of the tribe … I remember my hunger for traveling the country: December spent in the Mzab, the next months in the Sahara, summer preferably on the beaches in the west … And again, the oases, the ones in the east: escaping the new society,” and he laughed. “There,” he said, nodding his head toward his house behind us, “there is where I found them again, the people I was running away from. I couldn’t do anything else! Ah,” he went on, “those wonderful years of living single, as a nomad.”

He stopped. Then he described their meeting. A woman a few years older than him. With a ten-year-old child, and a husband.

“A major,” he sneered, then, more lenient, he smiled. “Of course, when she met him, he was a mathematics or physics student taking courses in her own provincial city, in Alsace, I think.”

I mused over the many couples I knew. The romanticism of yesterday’s nationalist war was not over yet. It still created an aura around love affairs between Algerian men and French women. But it was not long before the former “fighter” was “promoted,” becoming a director of some ministry, or a diplomat, or in this case a high-ranking military officer.

“She was bored at home. We fell in love … And after that it was nothing but catastrophe, one long summer of catastrophe! First happiness: she left her husband and son. We hid ourselves away in a mountain village in the Aurès. We lived in a summer cottage loaned by a friend …” He paused, steeling himself. “We should have escaped to Europe, right from the beginning! But she was afraid of permanently losing custody of her child.”

She was afraid , I thought. Imagine living happiness this way, streaked with fear!

He went on: “The major used all his connections to find us: the chief of police, a director of the interior, who knows? … But however he did it, they showed up one morning very early, with the police. They handcuffed me like a criminal to take me away. And then this husband, so certain of his rights, slapped her right there in front of me! And my hands were in shackles!”

He broke off his story. Was that when the Belgian ladies passed us on the beach and I told him about them? To let the present dissipate the miasmas of the past nightmare.

He went on, not describing the crisis, but rather the days that followed. “Almost a year!” he said. And the young woman ended up being expelled, stripped of her rights “for loose behavior.”

Now, I thought to myself, the major is remarried to some young native-born woman “from a good family,” of course.

“As for me,” he went on, “I spent three days in jail.”

He suddenly guffawed. “You should have heard my mother when she arrived with a lawyer from the family; her passionate diatribe against what she said was tyranny. In addition, she said, the crime of bride theft is not provided for in the Constitution!

He asked me how you say “bride thief” in Arabic. I told him and merrily recounted the fantasies that we children used to find so exciting when we attended weddings. They would shut the bride away, concealing her from everyone’s gaze. Even on the threshold of the bedroom an old woman stood guard to see that she was not left alone for a single second until her husband entered; until he tremulously lifted the silk veil covering her precious face. Because “the thief” is still there, he is hiding, endowed with every evil power, to gather her to himself and take her off into the forest! Some of these brides were waiting, I knew, their hearts pounding, for this khettaf el-arais . Many of them would have preferred this thief with all the beauty of the devil to the appointed groom!

He listened to me, this man who would not be my “thief,” and we returned to his past. He had lost his passport for almost a year. Finally he was able to locate Genevieve in France — only now, toward the end of his story did he call her by name. “Then, over there, more than a year later, not far from her parents, I had to acknowledge that we could no longer be happy … Not like before. She constantly felt guilty that her son had been taken away. She had joined a group of foreign mothers who, like her, are actively undertaking a legal battle. It was all over for the two of us.”