Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

A year went by in Algiers: the everyday life of war baring its teeth in the countryside, in the mountains set on fire with napalm where the resistants were hanging on in caves, where the peasants were brought down from the mountains and placed in camps under supervision. In the capital fear was a diffuse, gray fog, and it stayed that way for a long time, until later, somewhat later, one exuberant December. (The days of barricades on which, among the children and women who fell beneath the bullets, they flew the new flag, and its red and its green …) Later!

Before all of that the father kept up a regular correspondence with his son’s lawyer, and this time the mother looked as if she were resigned. She only talked about Salim when she was in Caesarea among women, her friends, who knew that she would not, certainly not, give up on making the trip to see her only son. The son who was “safe,” she called it, rather than “imprisoned,” because as months went by, how many young people around her, how many grown men would leave, disappear, be abducted! Even her brother (her half brother through her father), M’Hamed, her favorite because of his kind heart and his beauty. One day the French army searched the bus he had taken between Caesarea and Hadjout. They pulled him off the bus and took him and two other men, like him in their forties, into the nearby forest! Their bodies were never found; the lawyer assigned to the case had searched for some trace in all the prisons around. After six months there was still nothing! Our mother regularly went to Hadjout to see her sister-in-law and her four little ones — all of the relatives there certainly considered her a widow with orphans already. But the hardest thing was this: You could not weep for M’Hamed openly; he had no right to the ritual, even if his body was departed! “No,” her husband declared, “we have to hope for M’Hamed, we have to keep on searching!”

They came home from Hadjout, or from Caesarea, and there was a letter from Salim waiting for them with news that seemed banal, nothing unusual. He thanked them for the packages; he mentioned, as always, that he shared everything with his comrades. We pool everything we have , he wrote — and at least that was something, said the young sister when she came home from lycée and read the message in her turn — the fact that the usual censorship had left them those comments!

The mother no longer said anything — except in her regular conversations with the pharmacist, who sometimes came upstairs at tea time. The mother said nothing for that entire year; she endured patiently until finally the summer of 1960 arrived.

The mother left again in July, for the same treatment center, this time alone — her fourteen-year-old daughter had been sent to a summer camp for adolescent girls in the Pyrenees.

As soon as the traveler checked in at the Trois-Épis, she informed the housekeeping staff that she would leave the following Saturday, that she would return after the weekend, and that while she was away she would be in Metz. She took the train, then at the station she asked for the bus “to the prison.” She spoke now with no accent; her light chestnut-colored hair and her clothing from the most elegant shop in Algiers made people think not so much that she was a Frenchwoman (at forty, she seemed at least ten years younger, looking chic and a little tense) but rather a bourgeois from northern Italy or a frenchified Spaniard.

She arrived at the gates to the prison. Paying no attention to the posted schedules, she rang the bell and waited, her heart pounding. The caretaker behind his glassed-in station greeted her with surprise: “What about the schedule? What about visiting days?” Despite her ladylike appearance that led one to believe she was a teacher, a lawyer’s or magistrate’s wife, she explained in a voice that was almost a little girl’s (she was working so hard in this language), “I have come a long distance! From farther away than Strasbourg! I traveled yesterday and all this morning. I want to see my son.”

She gave Salim’s name.

“Your papers!” the guardian demanded, loud and gruff.

Somewhat disconcerted by the Arab name because he recognized it as belonging to one of the “agitators,” he could not understand: This lady seemed so well-mannered! Her, the mother? This almost-blond young woman who looks …

He watched her in silence, beginning to feel spiteful. She waited, forcing her face to reveal little of the agitation the wait was causing her: A fiancée , the suspicious man thought vaguely. She doesn’t look like a mother, not one from over there!

He ended up by telephoning to explain that there was a young lady there who claimed to have been traveling since the day before … She said she was “ ‘the mother of Salim,’ the young ringleader.” These prison inmates had spent the last year in a struggle for their status as “political prisoners,” which they ended up getting. They had even begun to set up courses in Arabic. “They’re pretentious on top of it all!” muttered the man awaiting his instructions, his eye on the visitor. The answer was not long in coming.

“Go through there,” he said to the mother. “They want to see you first. I don’t know if you will get to see your son! But you can go in …”

Then, confronted by the silhouette of the visitor passing through the second doorway, he suddenly felt vicious and angry.

They took away all of the mother’s packages. “What do you think, that we’d let you bring in delicacies like this, what you call your regional cakes, dates!” But there were more than sixty of them there, including the ten old ones from the most important crackdown in Lorraine (among them Salim, “the student”), and the collective atmosphere was permeated with tension. From here on in, everyone had to be on his guard. Until when? Who knows … It was that Salim who was responsible for the literacy courses. Of course, of course!

Up to that point, as she went down the half-lit corridors, she could hear the two guards in front of her talking to each other. She knew it was about her. She could not be sure of their tone: warning or grudging, perhaps to prepare her for the final refusal! She listened with an empty heart. One single apprehension filled her: to see him, just to see him, God help me and don’t abandon me! Not like last year! And her two guides went on with their chronicle, but their voices were lower: a hum, maybe not so hostile, preceding her.

One last door opened and suddenly there was light, brilliant and intense; it was the warden’s office. The other men vanished, but it was as if some recrimination on the part of everyone, guards, attendants, the janitor, awaited her on the other side.

A man stood there in front of her and examined her. She remained standing, empty-handed, her leather bag hanging from her shoulder. They will give me back my packages when I leave , she thought, not knowing what to do with her hands, and she still did not look at the stranger, just at his office and at this light that she was finally getting used to.

“Have a seat, madame,” said the very polite voice.

She sat immediately in the leather armchair facing the large desk. She waited, her hands resting on her knees. My son … Will he let me …? she agonized, as she now had the warden himself seated facing her.

The warden spoke … She did not hear everything. She tried to understand from his features, his delivery, his tone: Was he going to let her see Salim? Would they agree to it? She peered as if through a fog at the face of this man and she thought of all of them, the crowd of others, other men, an army … Faced with all of them (suddenly, through the open window a sound rose, outbursts of voices, giving brief commands …), she must try to remain dignified, to speak French correctly when she answered, so that they would see that she was perhaps a mother like mothers in “their country,” that …