Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

The warden repeats a question: “Did you come a long way? From Strasbourg?”

She nodded in the affirmative. Not waiting, he went on, not really hostile, she thought, beginning to hope.

“He is young, the youngest one here … He is intelligent and has character, too.”

Silence. Suddenly she thinks she is in a classroom; this man observing her discreetly through his eyeglasses could be one of her husband’s colleagues, the head not of a prison but of a school.

She knows what the conclusion will be just before he says it: “You shall see him! But here, in my office, just this once. Briefly. You have gone to a lot of trouble!”

It is true that she has come a great distance. A sudden weakness comes over her. She turns her head and would like to go to the open window, but dares not move. She breathes to overcome the faintness she begins to feel. Sounds at the door. Three silhouettes: The two guards stand there motionless, with “him” between them. Salim. Long and thin. Thinner than usual. And that strange beret like a plate on top of his head.

He looks at her. Without a word. Turns his head toward the warden. Says nothing. Waits, then hesitates and takes a step in her direction.

She has stood up. Sentences jumble together, rushing around inside her, in her throat. Strangling her. She cannot breathe. Sentences in Arabic.

“I will leave the two of you for fifteen minutes, or a bit longer!” says the warden in a loud voice, then, gesturing pompously but awkwardly, he speaks to Salim: “Embrace your mother!” He starts to add something but thinks better of it. He stands up, makes a sign to the guards. All three leave.

Finally, all at once, the sentences held back inside her, the Arabic words, tender, loving words, come out, burst out. Mixed with choked-back sobs and giggles.

Salim in her arms. He does not give himself over completely, he holds onto himself — and he is surprised (later, in his cell, he will think about it again) at her girlish exuberance. Which is what he had thought at first in the harsh light of the director’s office: So young, my mother, they must have thought that themselves! And even doubted! Later he would say to himself, When she dresses that way, like a Parisian, with gestures that are almost awkward because of her clothes, those short sleeves, the schoolgirl’s collar, all those colors, lilac, rose, fuchsia, she turns into a young girl!

She has calmed down, his mother. And now she is sitting, her serenity regained despite where they are. Maybe because, once alone with him, she had been able to let herself go in words that were Arabic. Which gradually restored her armor and decorum … Her appearance, her tone of voice, right down to the gestures of the traditional North African city-woman ( her household gestures , Salim thought gently), they all returned despite the way the French clothes looked, making her brittle, making her beautiful of course, but also exposing her …

She asked him questions: about his meals, how much time he spent in the courtyard, when the doctor visited. (“Since you haven’t grown any more, if you look taller, it is because you have gotten thinner!”) Does he sleep alone in … she says “your room”? He gives a sidelong smile.

“No,” he answers. “There are three of us.”

She asks what region the others are from. Kabylia? “Not from home!” she says.

He corrects her: “The whole country is ‘home’!”

“Of course,” she says, but she would feel less worried if her son, who is so young, were with men who were, if not from his town, at least from the surrounding area, some neighboring town … He is slightly annoyed, slightly ironic. She sees it, apologizes, stops talking, then considers the strange headgear, the beret that is too flat, too round, and flat as a plate.

“Can’t you take it off?”

She laughs: she thinks he looks, not exactly like a bandit or a hoodlum but, really, in the end — a prisoner. She says “prisoner” again in Arabic, then, with a sigh, “Prison!”

She reaches her arm out, hesitates, then, determined, she takes off this headgear, this … She runs her fingers through his short, curly hair.

Salim blinks. He sits down to face her but only when she focuses on his prisoner’s beret. He tells her, in a low voice, in Arabic, “They have left the door open!”

His voice sounds wary. If the director comes in behind him, he shouldn’t find the two of them confiding and talking like this in Arabic. He quickly asks for news of his father and his sisters.

She, in turn, starts talking again, but in French; he notices her careful enunciation, how much progress she has made. She speaks correct French now and almost without an accent! He could tell her this; he knows it would please her, this young mother who has come from so far away. He feels touched, but he says nothing. He smiles with his eyes. He listens to her.

She has launched in; she does not stop.

“Back at the Trois-Épis, I told the man in charge, you know, that I would just take one afternoon a week to go to Strasbourg! Now I have to go see my son in Metz. I need two days! This time and one other!” Then she says in a lower voice, as if it were a secret, some funny, harmless incident, “I added, naturally, ‘My son is a prisoner!’ ” Then she went on, louder and almost gaily, “A political prisoner!”

The warden stood there at the door. Salim stood up at once. His hand quickly replaced the beret on his curly hair.

The mother, who abruptly cut short what she was saying, looked up at her son. He looked now like a stranger again, like a young man wrapped, she felt, in a lack of respectability, some peasantlike and willful clumsiness. This boy, she thought to herself later, who was so stylish and elegant in adolescence — maybe it is the “politics,” or to make himself older, he is trying to look like a “real Arab,” like one of his cousins just barely out of the mountain zaouia!

Her face is twitching with sorrow; she does not notice it. She looks at the warden coming toward them.

Salim says softly in Arabic, “Goodbye, mother.”

He does not even bend toward her to embrace her. He will not embrace her in front of the warden and the guards behind him.

He studies the face of his mother. Clouded with a delicate sadness. He assumes an air of severity: “Be calm!” he seems to say, “in front of them. Them!”

She understands. She is unable to say a word. She does not even smile. The warden says in a voice that means to be understanding: “You have to tell your son goodbye, madame! … you will have to wait for visiting hours next time.”

Salim turns partway around. His mother stands up right next to him: she comes up to his face. He does not look at her. Just a gesture of his hands, touching her lightly on her shoulders. “Goodbye,” he repeats in secret, in Arabic.

Then abruptly he turns his back on her. He goes toward the guards. He disappears.

She, standing, empty arms dangling by her side. The warden sits down, watches her as he had in the beginning: almost the way an ethnologist watches, A Moorish woman? This young woman who is so well dressed? Those are the words he thinks as he stares at her.

She listens carefully to the information about visiting, thanks him, takes a sheet of paper with the schedule on it. She murmurs goodbye.

She shuts the door, follows the two guards who have reappeared so close to her down the gray corridors. The hubbub all around her: Like at the hammam, she thinks, and this persistent odor of dampness, her son stuck here for good! She hardens herself, keeps going at her own pace, goes past the attendant, who hands her back her original packages. She starts to refuse them, then takes them: She will mail them. Of course they will open them, but at least they will give him the underwear. She and her son have agreed that for spending money she will send him a money order; he’ll have it to buy his cigarettes.