Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

On the nearby mountain German planes were bombing a point strategic to the French army, and my mother took advantage of this to take her first steps in the “others’ ” language. Maybe the way her voice trembled, the slightly labored tone to her words, would go unnoticed when one French lady — one of the ones who usually stayed home — or some other — a teacher this time — gasped oh s and ah s every time there was a whistle outside, or a bursting shell’s repercussions echoed all the way to where we were …

There was all this ruckus; and in the midst of it, like an invisible ripple in the heart of the subterranean silence, there was my mother’s emotion. She had dared break in, slipping into the talk of the others — the neighbors, other mothers — but also the language of the school world, her husband’s usual realm.

I saw that: not the disproportionate levels of exhilaration, but this gap and the rosy color my mother’s timidity brought to her cheek before we returned to the surface and confirmed that in fact the village had survived, the houses were intact, the everyday world was safe and sound …

A few hours later, curled up in my little bed, I hear in the living room next to me the voice of my hesitant mother: She is asking my father whether or not, in the few sentences she spoke out loud with Mme. Carbonel, she made any very bad mistakes … I hear her questions again, the slight quaver in her voice: bits and pieces of conjugal dialogue — they have left the door ajar and think I am asleep. Their voices mingle in the shushing tones of the Arab dialect peculiar to our city that was once resettled by Andalusians … In that language my mother recovers her ceremonial habits, I would almost say her haughtiness, her elegance. That she might have displayed some sort of awkwardness just because she ventured into “their” language seemed to me then almost too much to bear. My heart was pounding. Looking back, I felt afraid: Could my mother, a woman so purely bred, of such distinction, have seemed otherwise to the other women?

Asking her questions now, and once again possessed of the warmth both of her own home and of her idiom, she regained her confidence — as if she had, indeed, been afraid, but needlessly. And now she seemed to give in more to an urge to flirt with her young husband.

Of course I remember none of what the father answered; maybe I did not really hear it. I only recall my brief feeling of helplessness about my mother’s words. Was there a danger that they (“them,” all the others who were earlier in the shelter, lit solely by a makeshift, overhead light) had an entirely different image of her than I did, who saw her wreathed in all her graces (her subtlety, her slight arrogance, her ease)?

Them: the foreigners, and not just the adults — men, women, and children equally — our neighbors in the building at the time; the more they brushed against us as we came and went every day, the more they seemed to me creatures from some other shore, floating in an ether that was not ours … Foreigners, whose language I was beginning to stutter, hardly less awkwardly than my idealized mother, complete foreigners for the resolutely silent grandmother (who, for six months every year, in almost total silence and out of love for the son, put up with living with the “others,” whom she found unpleasant). They seemed foreign to me: But am I sure I really thought they were entirely?

It should be recalled that the foreigner, during this period of collective servitude, did not merely seem different. No, if not always seen as “the enemy,” he was still at all times the roumi . (The native Jews were excluded from this category in our eyes, especially when the women, the old people, had kept “our” language, which was of course theirs as well, that they spoke in a “broken” accent that was their own.) But in very rare exceptions the foreigner was perceived as, was received as, the “nonfriend,” an impossible familiar with whom one associated only by force of circumstances. A dense though invisible silence, a blank neutrality like a criminal sentence, surrounded him, separated us. I was obviously too young to analyze or understand this impossible passage, but the fact remains that these teachers, their wives, their children, whom we mostly thought of as “the French from France,” seemed like unreal beings — they very rarely entered our home; we did not cross their thresholds; we made do with polite greetings in the stairway or the courtyard. When my father alluded to his day’s work to my mother, or reported some dialogue with a colleague, this person would appear on the scene as if he were a walk-on from some other place. And yet that night …

I have great difficulty approaching this first memory, this night when I was three, in my parents’ bedroom. Is it a knot that I am only now going to disentangle? Is it a welt, a crack, a definitive break that I immediately tried to erase on that night when these “French from France” did not seem to me (how strange this is) completely foreign?

Nights of early childhood. The ocher-colored bed of wrought iron is set just behind the door: it seems deep to me, so deep that I sink into it and I still have a vague memory of waking up in the morning and sometimes wanting to stand up — only my head showed above the bed.

In the beginning I sleep alone in the room; through the door left ajar I hear the sounds of voices: My father has to correct his students’ papers, it is my mother who is talking quietly with my paternal grandmother. The apartment is rather cramped.

I slowly fall asleep, reassured by snatches of adult voices. Across from me the window looks out on the village square and its bandstand. The windowpanes are covered with newspaper; this is wartime. Lying there, I stare at this newspaper. Was it during this period that I began to be fascinated by the same photograph, a French military man with a mustache, rather elegant, who stared at me at length in the triangle of light carved by the open door? A certain General Weygand, but I only knew that later.

So I slowly went to sleep under the general’s gaze. When I would wake up just before dawn, I would look first for my parents’ bed: Probably my mother, already up, was just leaving the room … On Sundays, it seems to me, I would ask if I could jump into that great big bed, to be there next to my father, or between them, in the hollow of their complicity … Laughter and chatter: the outbursts of these lazy mornings have faded irreparably (no, they came back to me vividly thirty years later, when my own little girl seeks out the same spot, on those lazy mornings, between father and mother!).

I still remember an unexpected awakening from this part of my childhood.

Wartime it was and in this village the siren often pierced our evenings or nights. When it howled, it seemed to me that I heard its endless spiral bore into my flesh: the alarm emanated from the town hall across from the teachers’ apartments. Consequently the first thing I would do was run to the bedroom window, and from it try to focus on the façade of the town hall. But it was already night. Everything had to be closed to make sure that not even the thinnest line of light would show. My mother and my grandmother went from one window to the next, one room to the next … I sometimes preferred to sink deep into my bed almost voluptuously, feeling I was the only one sheltered (the alarm, the airplanes — all that was up on the mountain and we could not even see the spectacle), but at the same time savoring the anxiety that was so exhilarating, so deliciously exhilarating.

It was only later that we began to leave the building and go in frightened groups to the hastily constructed trenches in the surrounding parks …

For the time being I am still in these first dark nights of mine: I am not budging from my bed; I am watched by the General Weygand of windowpane and newspaper — asleep like so many times before. But one morning I woke up just before dawn; everything around me, everything inside me reeled slowly.