Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

As soon as the mother arrived that morning, she had confided in her sister-in-law, “If this silence from Salim continues, I won’t be able to exist without showing anything, I won’t be able to put on a strong face for my husband and my little daughter, for …” and her voice fell.

“You and I will go to see Lla Rkia. Her visions are often of comfort … Still, she has to agree to it. Now that she has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and is a hadja , it is not certain that she will! Maybe for our family.”

After two messages sent via the little girl next door, the woman sent word that she would be expecting both of them at coffee time and that she was doing this “only to give thanks to God and his Prophet!” The sister-in-law had explained that this was the expression she used to let them know in advance that she would not accept any money because of remaining faithful to her vow. Nothing, however, prevented their being armed in advance with some special present, perfume from Paris or a silk scarf … So now they were walking along the low wall separating the old, antique theater and its ruins from the high road; they came to the little house tucked back into a dark corner.

The mother tapped on the carved iron “hand of Fatima.” They went in and crossed a patio that was small but dazzling with an almost purple light that seemed to flow from a heavenly fountain … Blinking still, her veil slipping off her hair, the mother quickly removed her face veil and bent over the venerable woman seated on a deep divan awaiting them. After the kisses and customary compliments the mother stood close to her sister-in-law and waited, her heart in a tumult.

It was the sister-in-law who spoke about Salim, almost calmly, in her soft, almost dreamy voice, as if he were there, as if in a second he would enter this room, bend down because he was too tall, half smile his sidelong smile … The mother, listening, accepted this nearby and not completely unreal presence.

Silence. The servant had just had a kanoun full of burning coals brought in without the mother noticing, and then slipped away. The silence stretched on but seemed translucent. In the shadows of the small, cool room, the mother saw the mask of Lla Rkia, her tawny scarf with black fringes. Beneath her half-lowered eyes, beneath her long, thin, arrogant nose, her thin, almost completely erased lips were murmuring in this no longer total silence: The old woman was uttering scattered, disconnected scraps of sura . Finally, they could hear the language of the Koran as if it were pouring from the mouth of a woman half dead: this time the mother waited without emotion. The sorceress swiftly threw a powder, or some herbs or a little sac of medicine, into the kanoun without having it brought closer to her. All at once whitish, then almost green smoke rose up, and for a moment the acrid smell made the two visitors cough. Inscrutable, the old woman waited, then when the smoke had dissipated and the women were calm, she asked in a haughty voice, “What month was he born, your prince?”

The mother hesitated and then said, “In the month of Rdjeb . The twenty-seventh, I believe.”

Once again, the fear in her causing panic (her wind a storm inside her). She hunched over, bent her head over her breast, tried to find the breath left hanging; finally she thought that she herself might say the beginning of a sura , the one everyone said, the fatiha . She repeated the first lines two or three times and regained her calm. She watched the lips of the soothsayer, whose eyelids were lowered in concentration.

The silence settled in the room. The sister-in-law seemed invisible, or dead. You could not even hear her breath, thought the mother, who was patient now and confident. If Salim knew, she said to herself, he would surely make fun of her! But if he saw her now, full of confidence, he would smile at her indulgently. Imagining this, this sort of tacit affection for her that he had expressed ever since puberty, was a comfort to her.

The old woman coughed. Then she began:

“Do not worry about the youth! The protection of Sid el-Berkani,”—the mother was grateful that she had not forgotten the hallowed ancestor up in the nearby mountains—“is upon him.”

She went on, speaking more softly, as if the vision were written down already and she only said what was there: “Do not worry about him. He will have a destiny … one greater than his father’s!” she finished off pompously.

The sister-in-law gently put her hand on the arm of her companion, who had started unknowingly.

After a sigh, almost a death rattle, the voice of Lla Rkia said loudly in triumphant tones, “I see him … I see him …” She hesitated then: “I see him walking on the road to Verdun!”

This last French word, which she pronounced rolling the r , surprised them. The two visitors looked at each other despite the half-light. They both knew old pensioners, veterans of the other war, who were called, even in Arabic, “the men of Verdun” —always with a rolled r . So what did the other war, the one from which only old men remained, have to do with this one, “our war”? the women wondered. Could it be that old Rkia in turn, despite her magic potions and her recent pilgrimage, was slipping into some disturbing senility?

“I will admit,” said the sister-in-law from under her veil on their return trip, “I thought, ‘She is rambling; she no longer can see the way she could before!’ But you see, she was firm when she said ‘Selim is in good health.’ Where he is does not matter!”

“She did relieve my anxiety a little,” the mother acknowledged.

They went home, where they found the others; of course it was only with the women, young and old, that they talked about Lla Rkia’s verdict. Some of them embraced our mother warmly and she thought to herself that this was one of the reasons she had come on this second day of Aïd —to share in the almost childish buzz of excitement and spontaneity.

That same night she went back to their apartment in the capital with her daughter, who was her youngest child, and her husband.

The following nights she slept peacefully.

Ten days later a letter from the court in Metz, in Lorraine, arrived. The prison administration informed the father that his son, aged less than twenty-one, had been arrested, that he was being indicted for “criminal association” and other equally pompous charges. The mother did not feel that these were as serious as the charges made against Salim when he had been arrested at seventeen in his own country. She remained silent, looked gravely at her husband, and breathed deeply, thinking excitedly, What is essential is that he is alive. He is safe. All the prisons in the world don’t matter! He’ll get out! Then finally she asked softly, “Metz, in Lorraine — isn’t that near … Verdun?”

“Verdun?” the father repeated, surprised.

“The seer, the one in our town …”

Stammering then in confusion but at the same time calm again, she explained, or rather admitted, that the last time she and her daughter had visited their town, she had met with Lla Rkia, who had “seen” Salim “on the road to Verdun,” she repeated almost triumphantly.

So the news of the arrest of their son did not really arouse either anxiety or alarm — at least not for the mother.

Shortly afterward the two of them left for the village to visit their old nurse. She herself had a son in prison in the south, “in the Sahara” she said. They could tell from her silences that her two youngest sons (though without sighing she said rather proudly that she had not heard anything from them) had very probably “gone up” into the nearby mountain, in short, joined the Resistance.