Assia Djebar: So Vast the Prison

“I’m disturbing you! I’ll leave! …” I spluttered.

“Not at all! Come in. I was asleep.”

There I was, right next to him in this living room with all its windows shut. Full ashtrays on the couch, a sickly sweet smell of enclosure; the record player on the tiled floor and records out of their sleeves spread around in a circle.

He left the room for a minute to get dressed. He kept on talking from the hallway in explanation:

“You came at the right time! I didn’t feel like doing anything, not even listening to music.” (He came back and waved in the direction of the records strewn all over the floor and the bulky tape recorder that was still turned on.) “I was sleeping because I was bored.”

I gazed at him, dressed now in white pants, thinner than usual, his face still tan as if summer lingered on in his buried-away house, his hair messy (my heart leaped with joy to see the way his beauty retained the carelessness of adolescence). I think I smiled at him, overcome by intense happiness. I went up to him. For the first time I took the initiative:

“Do you know what we’re going to do? We’ll go out in the backyard and play Ping-Pong! … I told you last time I’d beat you!”

He pouted lazily. Finally forgetting myself entirely, I went to take him by the hand to drag him outdoors.

“Are you sure?” he retorted, “That’s what we have to do? Don’t you want me to fix you some coffee? I’ll bring it to you, I’ll serve you … courteously.” He smiled. “I’ll put some music on for you, whatever you choose. We won’t budge! …”

I insisted, pushing and shoving him. Finally (I took him by the hand thinking as I did so: What I really want is to embrace you, to …!)

“First a game of Ping-Pong!” I persevered, pleased with my authority. “Whoever loses will fix the coffee.”

We went out into the part of the yard where there were plane trees, and a scraggly-looking figtree at the end of a path. The Ping-Pong table was dusty and a little wobbly. We found the paddles thrown in a corner against a border of wildflowers. We began the game.

Even now I can hear the sound of our laughter, my bounding joy, my aliveness … Of course, in the half-lit room inside, what opaqueness awaited us: embraces, silences, two bodies coming together, a tension knotting tighter and tighter that would surrender to the flexing of a neck, to lips seeking each other out, to bites just barely felt, perhaps to the tears of release if I come, will I come? … Soon, a bit later, in the bedroom.

Outside, however, I was not at all in turmoil. Only the present moment existed, hard in its innocence. What was it that was growing imperceptibly inside me and yet apart from me?

In the yard, lit aslant by the pale sun, in the midst of these villas almost all deserted because their occupants had gone back to their offices, their social life, their protocol there in the capital, we two were survivors of summer … My laughter grows louder, my partner lets out a disappointed curse, because I’m winning, I’m triumphant. He goes after the ball; I sing to myself; we start our game again. We are almost equals. I save a shot, I keep up my defense, then I lose ground, I burst out laughing, I’m out of breath, I’m nearly beaten, I don’t want that! … He pokes fun, takes the lead, his game turns out to be the steadier, the game seems too long for me, I’m impatient, I …

“How much fun it is, being children together!” I suddenly confess, taken aback by my discovery (with the result that I forget to parry, I lose, pretend to be sorry, I’m so far behind!) My surprise increases: Am I going to relive a past I never knew? Find myself in childhood with you? Is that the whole mystery?

I am making this truth glow in the hollows of my body, creeping all up and down my limbs (I run, I prance, my arm stretches high). Casual and carefree and absolutely, perfectly, tranquil watching you be my partner in this lightheartedness — a docile partner, one who is also leaping — I think I am six or ten years old, you are my playmate, this yard becomes the one in the village where I lived as a little girl … Where I might have met you before. No one around us would have found fault. Would you have been a cousin, or better, a paternal first cousin? You would have …

At first I didn’t even notice that the age difference (nearly ten years) should have prevented my keeping this fantasy alive: This man could not have been a child when I was! It is only just now that we are meeting! It does not matter: Is every love not a return to the first realm, that Eden? Since I could not have known him before (the prohibitions of my Muslim education having operated in two ways), I savor him as we play these games, in these first days of winter.

What time was it when we went back into the living room? I remember that we spent an hour or two in combined inertia, listening together to several records that I chose, but I refused to get involved in commentary or after-the-fact explanations of my choice. Music — to keep any dreadfully banal strategy from coming into play, we would listen to music, the prelude to our abandon!

I listened. Seated at the other end of the room with my head turned toward the French doors opening onto the vast beach. After quite a while I just stood up all of a sudden; I announced I wanted to leave. Outside, the evening was growing dark, gray and rose.

My Beloved got his car out to take me back. Driving back; night beginning. I was silent for the entire length of the trip; it seemed to me that we were going to drive all night long, to faraway lands.

When we got there, he stopped the engine and turned toward me: Did he have any idea how good I felt? Or share the feeling? His face, his eyes were so close in the intimacy of the car. His eyes shone and he said softly, “Did I disappoint you?” … barely uttering my first name.

“Disappoint me? How?” I replied, uncomprehending, then suddenly I embraced him: “I’ll give you a kiss,” I said, and I kissed him on his forehead, on his eyes, I stopped, I pulled away, I opened the car door.

He said my name again; I was halfway out and I added, almost cool, “I kissed you because tomorrow I’m taking a plane. I’ll be gone ten days or maybe twenty. I’m going to miss you!”

“You’re leaving! Where are you going?”

“Canada. Goodbye!”

I fled. Only then did my heart begin to beat uncontrollably. I stood there transfixed after the car left, swallowed up in the garden’s shadows; I waited for my breathing to return to its normal rhythm.

In the elevator I shook for the entire ten floors.

It all comes back to me; nothing is forgotten; but the acid of obliteration inexorably does its work anyway. I was thirty-seven at the time; ever since the age of twenty I had experienced a calm, enriching love, full of ambiguities I did not understand; the story, in its own way, could go on. What was the meaning of this great wave, this swell inside me? Why, I wondered, did I have this mad desire to relive childhood, or rather to be finally fully alive?

I thought, in the elevator, that I was shivering with cold, and I said to myself tearfully, Don’t come back from Canada. Go somewhere even farther, flee, get lost, never come back! I don’t want to slide into a wretched novel when I return!

I never pronounced the word passion . I didn’t dwell on either the word or the idea. I did not even guess that I was in the first stages of this strange illness that, for better or worse, would follow its own course.

WHEN I RETURNED, my confusion was gone and I considered the episode laughable, a passing weakness. It turned out I had to work in the same place as the Beloved.