Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

Usually by chance, sometimes out of professional necessity, surrounded by other people, at least once a day we would meet for five minutes or an hour. I could have prolonged our meetings under some pretext but didn’t think of it. Working under the same roof together! He was on the sixth floor and I was on the ninth, occupying offices almost identically arranged. I was struck by this, as if our parallel work spaces maintained some complicity between us (and so, in the snares of mutual attraction, the least details swell with exaggerated importance).

I remember how using the office phones made me want to talk to him, my voice low as if he were close by, because he was close by:

“Are you alone?” I would have asked.

“Yes!”

“Let’s talk!”

At least once a day, whenever work let up, I had this temptation to speak to him; an urge drilling into my heart. I usually brushed aside this desire. The sun-dazzled love affair that was all in my mind lay in wait deep within, but an inexplicable seriousness was taking shape inside me and gaining the upper hand.

At other times the danger, even though I knew I would not give in to it, was harrowing and persistent; there would be long moments of suffering. I would finally get up and cross my office to open the window, imagining that I could turn into a mermaid swimming in the blue. In just a few strokes I’d be there outside his window, invisible, to spy on him or rather fill my eyes with the image of him … I would return to my chair, and to my work, without enthusiasm.

Sometimes, uncontrollably distracted, I would abruptly stop everything, go out, take the elevator, and leave the building. Flee! Walk fast as far as possible, keep going on and on to lose myself forever, because back there at work, in my thoughts, I had found myself lost.

This upsurge turned into anger at myself, against what, as I rushed down a noisy boulevard, I took to be unacceptable weakness. And my mind, falling into the rhythm of my energetic walk, would be set in motion. What justified my being so stirred up? What was feeding my attraction? What was it about him? What was so extraordinary about this young man who was, after all, ordinary? This world, and this country in particular, were full of driven and inspired adventurers, unknown heroes wrapped in rare humility, this city itself — fifteen years earlier oozing bloodshed and lyricism — still contained at least ten or maybe twenty men, now living anonymous lives, who had shown how exceptional they were in their courage, their altruism, their Roman virtue, their …

Gradually I would grow calmer and get back to work. I did not forget that on the sixth floor an ordinary young man was working — a man whose voice never left me, whose gaze had come from childhood to pursue me. This man had power over me even if I was determined not to give in to it. That same day, a couple of hours later, meeting up with my Beloved in the elevator, I would smile innocently at him, happy to see him without having sought him out, reassured by my earlier victory over myself — something he was never to know about.

Nonetheless, two or three times in the course of these five or six months (I was starting research in musicology in this building whose musical archive was great treasure), I could not resist dialing his office number, feigning casualness in my gay tone of voice. I said, “Let’s talk! Let’s have recess, like at school!”

“Well, then, come down!”

“I can’t. Let’s talk on the phone. Whoever gets interrupted will instantly hang up, without saying goodbye. The other will understand.”

He agreed. We exchanged small talk, things we had read, bits of the past that came up willy-nilly. He was usually the one to remember: a fragment of adolescence, a walk, a trip. I listened and kept quiet. I felt that the way I listened encouraged him. One evening it seemed to me that his reminiscence was becoming so personal that I began to fear for him; I interrupted, calling him by his first name: “Listen, what if someone is listening on the line?” I ventured.

“You’re right!” he admitted; the conversation took off in another direction.

Once we must have talked for more than two hours straight. Finally I had the illusion that we were in the same room, each at a different end of it, settled into the darkness, and in fact we were so oblivious that I hadn’t turned on the office lights and night had crept in and swallowed me up. He confessed to the same thing.

I remarked that if one of our colleagues were to come, and hear us speaking softly on the telephone in the dark, what plotting he would suspect! We laughed like two kids on vacation …

“Did you ever know anyone like me? In a village? The sirocco would be blowing outside and all the children had been sent to take a nap and stay there … It seemed to me just now that I was whispering from my corner of the darkened room to my first cousin at the other end!”

He murmured, amused: “So, I’m your first cousin! Pleased to discover the bond!”

I went on, now speaking in Arabic; at the other end of the line I felt a pause or hesitation, so I went back to French: “Could you be my paternal uncle’s son? (that is what I had just said in Arabic). No, it’s not possible. I’ve just remembered that my father is the only son, because he lost his adolescent brother in a bus accident a long time ago. You might be the son of my maternal uncle, though! You know that the paternal branch is what counts for inheritance, and consequently, in a marriage for money, whereas the maternal line is, on the other hand, the line of tender emotions, affection, and …”

I was going to add “love,” but in this conversation about this and that, the French word would have seemed obscene to me.

“You’re teaching me all sorts of things, professor!” he joked.

Taken aback by his ignorance, I dared my first personal question: “Really? Didn’t you have an Arab childhood?” Then I added, without thinking, “Maybe your mother is French, or …”

I was ashamed at being so indiscreet.

“No, not French,” he replied. “She was Berber, or in any case a speaker of Berber. But she always spoke to me in French, nothing but French!” He laughed and added somewhat roughly, “Didn’t you notice that I only speak French? Not a single Arabic or Berber word comes into my sentences. Nothing, no exception, no asides!” He laughed nervously. “Let’s say I talk like a pied-noir . I speak English very well if you want variety.” Silence; he mused. “I was twelve at Independence … I shut myself off completely from Arabic—’dhe national language,’ as they call it here. And I don’t think that I’ll develop a taste for the official language. I’m not planning a career!”

I listened to him but I did not retort as I should have: Those eight or nine years by which I am older than you mark a changing era. When I was fifteen I lived in a country at war! Arabic was the language of flames — not of governmental power, as it is now. When one learned Arabic, outside of school, it was not to have a career but to be willing to die! Oh, how I wanted to go off into the mountains then!

Instead, after a silence I added in a sad voice, “I’m hanging up! Turning on the lights. Goodbye!”

The lights went on in our two offices simultaneously. An hour later we said goodbye among other colleagues, on the square at the main entrance.

I went home in a whirl, my soul overwhelmed. What is time? I thought. Have I not returned if not to the time of my childhood, at least to my preadolescence? Have I not found my first cousin, the real one, the one I truly love — the other one was brash and insolent; this one would have been affectionate and conspiratorial. We would have shared all the fun and joy of that time with a twinkle in our eyes .