Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

Lla Fatima arrived in haste four or five days later (taking the bus to Bou Saada, then as far as the road was passable in a car, after that she asked for a mare, a mule, anything at all, and there before the surprised peasants she proudly straddled her mount). She was impatient to see her youngest daughter safe and sound, even though she had been abandoned to the customs of the past. When my grandmother found herself there with the midwife (whom she brought a remnant of cloth from the city for her séroual , perfumes from Mecca, and a string of beads that were blessed as well), the two women plunged immediately deep into a conversation that lasted the entire evening.

Even though she was able to get up after the third day and take a few steps before lying down again, my mother was lying there on her bed and heard them laughing. She thought, How long it has been since I heard my mother laugh, she is such a stern woman! They seem to get along well!

Finally the midwife left, spreading a great flood of blessings. Lla Fatima said to her daughter, “Do you know how she greeted the arrival of your first child, when the baby uttered its first cry?”

“I heard her give some long speech,” said my mother, “but I didn’t understand any of it.”

“Luckily her version of Berber and mine, the one I spoke as a child, are rather close: we talked together like two cousins!”

She began laughing all over again, long, soft laughter, almost inaudible, but it shook her entire torso. Bahia, still surprised, watched her until finally she took a breath, and went back to what she was saying. “The midwife greeted the child, when your pains finally came to an end: ‘Hail to thee, daughter of the mountain. You were born in haste, you emerge thirsty for the light of day: you will be a traveler, a nomad whose journey started at this mountain to go far, and then farther still!’ ”

The young mother, Bahia, said nothing.

“So much talk for a girl!” She sighed.

“You will have a boy the next time!” retorted the grandmother.

The second delivery took place as Bahia had hoped. She did not necessarily expect such radiant beauty in a newborn.

The blue eyes, of course, that was ancestry on his father’s side — whereas her daughter had hazel eyes; she had noticed this but not mentioned it to anyone. They were the honey color of Chérifa’s eyes, the sister she had lost as a child, for whom she had never wept.

When she was just slightly more than nineteen, Bahia savored the joy of entering the realm of the mothers. For a month, as if to make up for the fact that the firstborn, the daughter born a “mountain girl,” had not been entitled to the usual honors, women poured into Lla Fatima’s house to pay their visits.

“A prince! You have been granted a prince, you, your mother’s princess!” the closest neighbor exclaimed, the one people considered the most eloquent both on happy occasions and for bereavements.

Two months later Bahia carried the baby in her arms as she left. Enveloped in a silk veil, she took the bus with her husband to the Sahel village where my father had just been named the “teacher of a class for natives.”

Where was I during this first trip? I certainly have no idea. My mother has no memory of it. It seems most likely that my father carried his little girl in his arms.

“Unless you walked at eleven months. Then you would have trotted along beside us to the bus stop.”

My mother does remember how much care she took to protect the baby in her arms: hiding his face, keeping him safe from the dust!

“Also from the evil eye!” the grandmother had advised her.

That is how the four of us entered the French apartment where I lived until I was ten, except for summers and the winter and spring vacations. Then we used to take the bus (later we would go in our own car) to the old city. To us, my mother and me, it seemed a haven, a cocoon: and my magical child’s memory turned it into a place of constant celebrations where gentle, languid women seemed to laze around.

When we lived in the apartment, we felt we were “among the French.”

“That is,” my mother explained to her friends when we would go back, “French people from France!” The teachers’ families all come from France. They say hello to us; I even learn a few words from our neighbors … ( What an experience! the friends think, curious) “But the others, the Europeans who live in the village, it’s like here: They have their world and we have ours!”

So, in the apartment building meant for teachers with families, we touched the fringes of another realm that was entirely strange for people from Caesarea: “the French from France.” Needless to say, in that village, we, my mother and I, were within a hair’s breadth of touching almost another planet.

“I have two languages,” says the mother orphaned for twenty years.

“Orphaned” that is, having lost her first son.

I hear this moan later, many years later: “I have two languages!” Twenty years after it happens the mother travels across France. In Strasbourg, in the hotel where she sleeps, where she cries herself to sleep, she awakens in the middle of the night. Does not turn on the lights. Opens her eyes and looks. Remembers? So far away from her imprisoned son whom she only saw for an hour, far from the Algeria she left in reckless daring, looks back on her days in the distant past, looks.

The baby in the apartment: when she crossed the threshold, her first son in her arms, under all her numerous veils. And she talks; she talks to me:

“He was six months old … In the village, it was just before the beginning of the holidays when we would leave for Caesarea. My mother-in-law lived with us, she was rather shy, and even uncommunicative; she knew so well how to rock him at night before he dozed off and very early in the morning, to let us sleep. She leaned over the cradle.

“I still hear the baby’s prattling; he had burst into a long bird cooing and then a chirping. The grandmother burst out laughing; I had never seen her that way, so excited. ‘Do you hear, my daughter: He just spoke in Berber!’

“And seeing my doubt, she insisted, ‘I promise it’s true! Of course, words just one after the other, almost bits and pieces. No one constant meaning … but it was Berber!’

“I shrugged my shoulders. I left the room. I regret doing so now, because he is not here anymore — the six-month-old baby (how could he have spoken Berber, not a syllable of it was spoken in our home … As for the village nurse, she came to us when my second son was born). And I feel remorse because of her, my mother-in-law; because she is now dead and because, except for this scene, I do not believe there was any point at which I failed her … she was sweet. When I was brusque with her that day, it must have hurt her.

“So we went to spend the vacation in Caesarea. In the middle of the worst dog days of this scorching summer he became sick, my baby; one Friday night … And before the end of the next morning he was dead. In just a few hours he had become completely dehydrated … The French doctor muttered, ‘You should have awakened me during the night!’ Dead and buried the same day, my baby! The language was smothered with him, I know. He went into the earth with his mouth open; fingers spread wide on his hands, and his eyes … His eyes, I still wake up at night and see them, I stare into their blue!”

My mother did not want to go to his grave. Even after the third day. She would not go back to the cemetery except for the funeral of Lla Fatima, her mother, who died a week after independence!

Salim, the son still living, has only just gotten out of the French prisons. First, however, he has to spend some time in a sanatorium — his lungs weakened in his last prison in Rouen, where he spent too much time in solitary confinement. (The only memory I share with my mother of her many trips to the French prisons: a day in 1961 when, the three of us, my mother, my young sister, and I, all went to the prison. The director, who received us in his office, his cold gaze fixed on this lady flanked by her two young daughters, told us that Salim would remain “in solitary” after his failed attempt to escape).