Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

“He died honored by all men and all women?” I asked tongue-in-cheek. “This Ferhani who,” I stressed, “was the one responsible for the death of his wife!”

“Oh!” My aunt was surprised. “In those days men were naturally harsh! Often without even being aware of it … And others, of course — Moh’, your mother’s half brother, comes to mind, and M’hamed, the younger half brother — others keep their hearts untarnished. Sometimes they even love just one woman in their lifetime! Ferhani died in the sanctuary. I remember hearing the news of his sudden death; I was a little girl. As for the saint’s tomb, what is left of it? Nothing, only ruins, the result of the war of liberation! Today’s “people in high places,” as you well know, make fun of our marabouts … Because they themselves have no lineage.” She muttered in displeasure, shrugged her shoulders, then was silent.

Now, during the week following the final breakup of my first marriage, as I plunged into the maze of my genealogy — the genealogy of my mother and of the grandmother whom I used to feel was so terrifying — I reconstruct this memory.

I wanted to conjure up the grandmother when, just before 1900, old Soliman died: What was the day like when the seventeen-year-old widow left this house that later would be so familiar to me?

The entire extended family, numbering so many, is there after the third day of the funeral. The women have returned from the rustic cemetery, the one overlooking the city and close enough to the Roman baths on the west that the dead of recent generations are getting in the way of the digs that scientists from the capital consider necessary!

Soliman’s sons, his daughters, and his grandsons respect the standard custom, keeping the house (which, for many, during these times of deprivation, seems the last remaining little Arabian palace) in joint ownership and favoring the eldest along with the most energetic (or at least the least lethargic) of the younger ones. Oddly, several of Soliman’s sons, unlike the founding father, will prove to be dreamers and given to pleasure, frequenting musical evenings or spending their time in the company of fishermen in secluded inlets. So “the most capable” are allowed to manage the surrounding farms and orchards.

The hierarchy of the heirs was visible in the new division of the domestic quarters: The second floor, the most splendid (because the father lived there), with its four long, deep bedrooms each of which had its separate kitchen and “Turkish” toilet, and galleries covered by luminous mosaics, with banisters whose twisted columns were made of cedar and pine from Aleppo, was reserved for the sons of the first marriage, or at least the ones who remained in the city. The rooms on the ground floor were more numerous but more shady, wide open to the patio, with its basin and fountain rippling their tiny, honeyed music. These were reserved, half for the daughters (the repudiated one and several grandchildren, adolescent girls) and half for the two younger sons who remained bachelors … (I imagine them from puberty on feeling vaguely disgusted, or merely uncomfortable, with the “vitality”—in marriages and descendants — of their omnipresent father!)

This new division of the space must have been made easier when Fatima, the young widow, had let them know — either through one of the old women (one of those poor relations living there two or three months at a time before finding shelter somewhere else, in another of the “great houses” of the city) or telling the eldest daughter-in-law directly — her decision. “I shall not remain with you. You are my family of course. But I have sent for my father to come for me and my little daughter.”

The daughter-in-law replied, “This house is your house, O Lalla.” Because even if the young widow was not yet twenty, she was still the only widow of old Soliman and had a sizable share in the inheritance.

Fatima looked at Halima for a long time, Halima, always the most eloquent one in the sadness of these restricted days: “I thank you, O Halima. This house will be a haven for my daughter, Khadidja; she will be well off here among you, among her brothers and sisters. There are many of them, thanks be to God! But please, tell your husband that I have sent for my father. Because tomorrow I want to return home with him.”

Halima emotionally kissed the widow’s hand and cheeks. She had had the opportunity to confirm Fatima’s character and maturity. (“Just sixteen!” Halima thought to herself. “If only the dead man’s sons, the ones who are already forty, had the lucidity of this adolescent!”)

Father Ferhani, adorned in his two togas, the one of Tlemcen wool and the heavy woolen one from Fez, arrived that very evening. He bore regretfully a message from his wife (whether he admired or loved her I do not know; perhaps he was also afraid of her): Amna the Golden Woman, made known to her half brothers that she would not take part in the discussions concerning the inheritance, that they should inform the cadi of this. Allah had assured her — thanks to her mother’s wealth alone. which her father, it is true, had luckily made profitable — of a comfortable and peaceful life. She was content with that. She had no descendants. Her husband, thanks be to God, was noble and “beloved of God.” Consequently his house and “the caïd’s orchards” (the most beautiful olive trees on the hillsides as well as an orange grove at oued el-Mellah) were enough for him: for his comfort and for the alms that she would now give increasingly. She would take care of the youngest of her sisters, Khadidja, who was scarcely two, the daughter of Fatima, and, by lucky accident, the granddaughter of her husband whom she so much respected … Let Fatima come to her home and live there, where she would be surrounded by peace and serenity!

And so Fatima packed her bags: three willow trunks lined with pink satin, several others that were wooden and painted in the Algerian style, her gowns, and above all her jewels, the ones from her marriage and the ones that Soliman liked to buy her almost every month, because toward the end he had become more and more extravagant with his young wife.

Fatima takes her little daughter in her arms, even though she is as heavily veiled as when she arrived for the wedding night three years before.

During the three years that she lived there, she left the big house regularly once a week on the eve of Friday to go to her father and her stepmother’s house. From the beginning she had told Soliman, “My father is used to having me be the one to bring him the copper cup for his ablutions and then the towels every Friday morning, and having me unfold his antique rug from Fez for him. I do this for his dawn prayer because the second prayer he makes in public, though not like his father. In earlier days his father would descend from the zaouia just to pray at the great and venerable mosque, the mosque “with a hundred columns” and built of green marble — alas, this sacred place was turned into a common hospital by the French! But my father goes now to the oldest remaining mosque, the one most people go to.”

Soliman, in the bedroom — this was around the tenth day after the wedding and already Fatima knew how to make her desires known — had listened to his child wife’s wish: “Oh, I wouldn’t like for my father, the mokkadem , not to have me there at dawn every Friday!” Then Soliman, to everyone’s astonishment, agreed, with the excuse that Fatima was descended from mokkadems (and thus blessed). Every Thursday evening she went to spend the night in Amna’s house with her father; she stood there at her father’s bedside at dawn, even before the faintest voice from the most distant muezzin could be heard.