Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

Probably during the night there had been some vague turmoil of which I was barely aware, but it had not awakened me. Probably my sleep this time was not clear and limpid but rather jerky and uneven, in fits and starts. In the distance voices, torn but still dangerously blanketing me; suddenly a white light over my head, over my closed eyes, then abruptly turned off; a few whispers in the dark, maybe other people. Or had I rather dreamed some new voice, the soft tones of a foreign woman and — (but it was only long afterward that I would not piece together what I heard that was not part of my usual sleep) a “French” sound. It was as if the parents’ bedroom had shifted horizontally, was half open to the village square, and there, where I still slept in my baby’s bed, where I still kept my eyes shut on purpose, I and my relatives standing around me were exposed to the four winds in front of everybody, in front of “the others.” And so France was for me simply the outside.

Finally I opened my eyes; nothing in the room had moved. However, right away, in the half dawn it seemed to me that there was no denying, because of the strange night sounds but also because of a certain stillness around the beds, it was obvious: I was waking up somewhere else, in a room that seemed the same but was totally different.

Bright daylight, gleaming gray-blue transparent lights, lit the imposing mahogany armoire whose tall mirrors had beveled edges, the one that stood there, on show and impenetrable, across from us. Tick-tock. Regularly, from the clock on the other side of the room.

Where was I? I did not move. My heart was pounding. Where were my parents hiding? I did not sit up. I did not look beside me. And still there was this absurd impression of being both there and somewhere else: the sound, the sound of breathing was different; a different silence inhabited the big bed. Then I greedily studied that hollow in the bed to discover whose imperceptible breathing was covered by the sheets … My father, my mother, where were they? In the blur of the night I heard their voices in the turmoil, or in my dream. My heart was pounding wildly.

It did not take long for me to determine that they were not sleeping nearby; the window grew bright. A woman’s hand, not my mother’s, a fat, white hand emerged from the sheets, lit the lamp, a different voice, not my mother’s, murmured.

Murmured what? Some question. I must not have understood. But I recognized the French language: I was definitely waking up in the home of foreigners!

I open my eyes, in the lamplight and the gray light of dawn. I look. In the parents’ bed our next-door neighbor — a teacher who is widowed or divorced, I do not know which — is sleeping. And what is more, beside her is her son — stretched out in “our” bed. “Ours,” I thought as if this were the final, irreparable breaking and entering in the night — occupied by the teacher’s son, a boy who was ten or twelve, Maurice. It is only just now his name comes to me intact.

So there they lay in my parents’ place, “them,” the French mother and her son, our neighbors … That night there had been sirens and German bombing in the nearby hills. In this terror the neighbor who was alone had panicked: she had come and knocked on our door. To reassure her, my parents had invited her in and had, quite naturally, given her their room. They made do themselves with a mattress on the floor in the dining room: just everyday Arab hospitality … he was, poor thing, a woman alone.

There, right next to me, as I lay motionless in my bed, a new couple were stretched out: the mother and her son … The boy was sleeping: I only saw his silky light brown hair. The teacher was sitting up in bed. She was wearing a nightgown, her ample bosom, her blond hair loose on her round shoulders, and on her chubby face a smile that was almost a little girl’s, sweet and half surprised, was turned to me. She looked at me, as if asking to be forgiven, then glanced tenderly at her still-sleeping son.

“Maurice,” she began, then she turned back to me, because, probably, I was staring at her fixedly, as if demanding some explanation for this intrusion.

I did not get out of bed. I no longer stared at the neighbor. I felt this boy there right next to me, a boy who in those days must have seemed to me a sort of hero, one close but faraway. For me this was the height of disruption—“he” was in my house, in the most secret part of “my house,” of “our house,” and he kept right on sleeping as if nothing had happened!

That night when the tumult was unable to wake me up completely, that night became one of transmutation. The mother and her boy, the “French,” were of course neighbors on the same floor but also the closest representatives of “the other world” for me; “they,” this couple sprung from the dark and stretched out there in the open for me to see, had taken my parents’ place!

Substitution: I must have spent long minutes thinking it was irrevocable, that my parents had vanished into the wings of the scenery, that this pair of recumbent forms, mother and son, were taking their place. Was I not going to become different all of a sudden? In the slow shifts of this astonishing night was I not going to remain like this: simultaneously in the bedroom of my parents (perhaps they had even chosen different roles themselves, in some other people’s house, in some other French apartment?) and discovering I was in the opposite camp?

No, I would not move from my bed, my only haven. I stayed, open-eyed, frozen. So many years later I am relocating the ineradicable minutes of this awakening, trying to relive inside myself: what did I feel, what made me worry?

The fear that one might have expected from a little three-year-old girl who imagines for an instant that she has lost her parents — this is not a fear I recognize … The excitement of an unknown world, a new mother (the neighbor did of course seem older, more of a “matron” than my mother, who was then scarcely more than twenty), no, that is not familiar either. The nearness of this twelve-year-old boy, however, this boy with whom I would sometimes play in the afternoon in the park and who seemed to me a young man, this unexpected familiarity provided an ambiguity and keen pleasure that I can deal with more readily.

So there I stayed: neither frightened nor particularly excited by the adventure. I relive the awakening. For a few seconds I imagine I am a little Arab girl (myself, my bed, with my silent, gentle grandmother close by) and yet suddenly all decked out with French parents: this widowed (or divorced) lady with her hair down who is casually waking up next to me.

I do not smile. I make no move to get up. Finally my mother appears at the door. The neighbor rises and sincerely begs to be forgiven for her night fears.

I closed my eyes. I did not want to see anybody. I felt I was at the border, but which one? One moment I was going to have a French mother, a “brother” and not “a brother”; her son stretched out close by, in this great big bed into which I liked to leap and curl up between my father and my mother. I closed my eyes. I am sure I must have dreamed that I was going to jump into this big bed again, back in my old Sunday ways, squeeze up next to the “lady,” between her and her son, next to Maurice, between mother and son, who were my parents, speaking French, breathing French … That is the moment I experienced at the age of three.

That was perhaps a year or more before I began school. This waking up, the only one from my early childhood, is still unexpectedly the most vivid. (It is oblique, its mobility establishing its fragile equilibrium.)

What were my games like then? In the courtyard of the apartment building, my voice sings the usual counting rhymes tirelessly, while with the other little girls I throw the ball against a high wall painted white. Then we play hopscotch or on the swings … I don’t wander off into the village; my father set limits on where I can go: the courtyard and the garden in front, never the street.