Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

In the off-season the young husband, who had been so busy and energetic, became unruly! He liked the itinerant bands of musicians and supported them. Sometimes he would not show up until dawn after evenings spent far away in the company, people said, of dancers … News of this was reported any number of times to Fatima, who, with her children, remained near the sanctuary. Did she regret the days when, she, all alone in her father’s zaouia , knew just as well as this man how to inject enthusiasm into everything, or did the shadow of the dancers inhabit the sleepless hours of her lonely evenings? She was of two minds.

Then Malek would settle down and devote himself entirely to overseeing the crops. Everyone called him the chatter , the man who is energetic and unflagging, throughout the region.

The little girl that Fatima had by him, Bahia, was two, the same age as her eldest daughter, when Fatima was widowed for the first time and decided to return to these “back” mountains — the Dahra. She muttered this word: dahra; ancient revolts had taken place on this site, and it was also, she thought: “the site of women’s bitterness” (as if, suddenly, the image of her mother who died so tragically, had the upper hand)! In the end she decided upon the separation of property that is provided for in Islamic law.

“To protect my son’s future!” she would say on the day that she and almost all her children rode in the barouche back down to Caesarea for good.

Two or three years later she is just barely getting used to her new house. She learns that her husband, Malek, whose weekly visits have become less and less frequent, has now taken action. Lla Fatima did not plan to live in the mountains again (using the excuse of her son’s French education). Lla Fatima does not want to come back and moreover does not let him manage the land. So he will remarry. He sends her the letter of repudiation … Is it on this black day that she starts going into her dramatic trances? No, I think not.

Misfortunes continue even though she has just bought another house. It is near the European quarter, just behind the church built like an ancient temple; this building is larger, its huge rooms have windows and balconies facing the street on the first floor, but they also look out onto Moorish galleries opening toward the sea and the port. So it is in a modern, mixed style (she is already imagining her son’s wedding that will be celebrated here in ten years)! She does not yet live there. She leaves one of the apartments on the ground floor rented to the city’s former rabbi and his family, whom she knows. She will live on the main floor and meet with her sharecroppers in the unoccupied rooms downstairs … She thinks about how she will move when autumn comes.

And yet misfortune (or probably “the evil eye”) continues: This is 1924 and there is an epidemic of typhoid fever in the city — it occurs first in the surrounding regions, but no one pays any attention, then it quickly reaches the Arab quarter.

Just before summer Lla Fatima realized that almost all her children were infected. Only Malika remained healthy, and took care of Chérifa, who took to bed first, then Bahia, the little one, who became dangerously delirious as a result of her raging fever. When it was Hassan’s turn to become tortured by constant vomiting, Lla Fatima lost heart. She was alone: Her father had been dead for ten years, her younger sister had long ago married in a distant city, and Amna was now practically paralyzed by the rheumatism of old age.

Aided by Malika — who was just thirteen but a hard worker, silent and energetic — Lla Fatima coped with it all. She decided that she would even call a doctor — yes, the French doctor, why not: she was the first Arab “lady” in the city who dared do so. The physician, a gruff man of fifty who could speak a few words of the local dialect, came to the house, curtly sounded “the hand of Fatima” at the heavy door, crossed the patio, went into the first room, where the son had lain, almost unconscious, for three days. He listened to his chest, wrote out a prescription, then asked to see the daughters who were ill. He spent more time over Chérifa, who smiled at him sadly (it was only at that moment that her mother became aware of how thin the adolescent had become: she never complained, she was sweet and passive in her illness, her narrow eyes looking at you from far away, so far away, and always this smile! …). Bahia, the baby, also seemed to worry the Frenchman. Without consultation he administered some lotions he carried in his heavy satchel; he wrote out a second prescription and said he would come back in two days’ time.

While he was washing his hands and wrists — Malika poured the water for him from a ewer by the edge of the well — he remarked that he was an object of curiosity for the anonymous women watching from the neighboring terraces. He did not even smile: Fatima’s children were on his mind, and Fatima understood this and was grateful for it. So a Frenchman could be her ally. She gave him her sincere blessings in thanks and asked how to “pay him”; he answered briefly in Arabic: “Afterward,” and he left.

This created a small revolution in the city. The old families took note of the fact that Lla Fatima (who was nonetheless descended, both through her father and through her two last husbands, from the men who had formerly resisted the occupying forces) had not thought twice about having her children treated “in France.”

Hassan, moreover, was the first to get well, and it seemed to his mother that the first noose had been untied. Bahia was still lethargic and hardly spoke at all. She hardly ever left the bedside of Chérifa, whom she adored, in whose arms she had loved to fall asleep so often — Chérifa, who did not get well.

Lamentations of women … The little girl crouched at the head of the young dead woman.

The little girl sits dry-eyed before the crowd of women in white all seated in a circle around Chérifa, swallowed up beneath the shroud, only her face still visible, pale, a mask. The little girl who is looking at it does not speak, will not speak, not tomorrow, nor still at the end of the week.

The kinswomen are touched; one of them comes and tries to take hold of Bahia, to make her sit on her knees: “A six-year-old child, in state like that at the head of a dead woman!” “Beware of the evil eye!” warns another, and the third: “Chérifa, may God have mercy on her, was in fact like a mother to her youngest sister! As if she had a premonition, poor girl, that she would never have children, that she would die first!” “Orphaned by her sister, that is the most awful thing!” moaned another, a woman they did not know. She was from the capital, recently married, and her beauty was a little wild, which made her somewhat feared and respected by her sisters-in-law.

“The loss of the sister, awful?” exclaimed an old woman with an inquisitive look. “It is the mother, when one loses a mother, that leaves you with an open wound!”

“I am sure,” continued the stranger (they called her this because she did not speak her dialect with a Caesarean accent), “that losing a sister is the worst!” Then, without getting up, she recited in a louder voice and in learned language:

“O my other self, my shadow, my one so like me ,

You are gone, you have deserted me, left me arable ,

Your pain, a plowshare, turned me over and seeded me with tears.”

At these last words, rhyming in ancient Arabic, a woman suddenly shrieked. She stood up, tall and thin; she tore her scarf with one hand, and the fingers of her other opened to tear slowly at her left cheek.

The poet crouched there and was silent; Bahia stood up, her mouth gaping and her eyes growing larger at the sight of the bloody face of the weeping woman. Another woman gently tried to draw the little girl to her. The one who screamed just that once now was casually wiping her cheek, then suddenly she had something like a spasm, her torso shaken as if with a sort of laughter. To everyone’s astonishment, she cried out: the strange language that most of these city-women did not understand or that they had forgotten and greeted now as the improvisation went on by making faces that showed their embarrassment mixed with condescension. The Berber language ran rapidly on as if pawing the ground, stamping, as one woman whispered to another, “That is the dead girl’s cousin who has come down from the zaouia ; she often improvises like this in their mountain language!”