Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

For the moment, standing there motionless, Isma’s vision is clouded. The sounds, the crying, the purring, like mini-orchestras distributed among these beds as if they were many orchestra pits. She steps forward. No longer is she aware of anything except the room that seems to her both full of people and, at the same time, transparent — a lake of absence so far from the city. Forgetting her husband behind her, she walks cautiously.

Suddenly she is stopped by the arm of one of the nurses, who recognizes her and greets her with a smile. She says a few words; at first Isma does not understand, then finally she realizes that this is a neighbor from her building. The woman boisterously reminds Isma of meeting once and even of a conversation at the butcher’s where they both shop. She is a round woman with a puffy face; her red hair is pulled back and her eyes are moist. Soft sweetness spreads from her whole being, a sort of healthy freshness. She bends down beside a bed and takes a child in her arms, perhaps even the one who was purring like a kitten. She holds him out to Isma.

“This is my favorite!” she adds unequivocally.

Tense now, Isma avoids looking at the child she is offered. She feels ashamed, pressured. The baby begins to wail, its spasmodic cries more and more high-pitched. The nurse turns around and, just as abruptly, returns him to his cradle. There is an unexpected languor in the way she curves from the waist to do this, like a dancer rehearsing. Isma smiles slightly, turns away.

She starts to walk again. She finds she is in the middle of the long room. She has not yet come up against any child’s face, not one expectant face. She finds she is relieved; is she trying to avoid saying no, being somehow strangely guilty?

There is no longer anyone in front of Isma, only the white beds, hollowed out, two rows of pink splotches under sheets one can barely see. The nurses seem to have vanished. Isma does not even turn around to make sure her husband is still following her.

Silence again. The invisible presences, curled up, urgent, down inside each bed. She has decided to walk on: as if almost done with an exam she is intent on passing. Suppose they, the motionless, wordless beings, suppose they are the ones who, in some imperious and capricious aphasia, will decide?

Yes, she is sure of it: The magical and necessary choice is going to be imposed from these beds, from all these many hollows watching her intently. They are asleep, or they are awake, those presences, but certainly they are waiting. They are waiting for her.

Isma is almost at the end of the corridor. Facing her is a French door with a long curtain of blue-gray organza quivering in front of it, its long folds poured in an oblique wave moving downward. She stops; not knowing why, she turns her head: the last bed.

“She” rests there: Isma sees only her big black eyes, almost round, how they look out with the gaze of a peaceful woman. At the same time the gaze is full, so full that the deep bed is full, Isma thinks, and threatens to overflow. A flooding gaze. And yet its black water is clear, solemn, as if it were going to submerge the surrounding space. The little girl—“a three-month — old baby who always smiles,” says a nurse who has returned to stand behind Isma — the little girl contemplates the morning visitor.

Fifteen years later I describe the moment for her: “You were waiting for me! All I saw was your eyes! You were the only one I saw! When we left that room, your father, like me, could only talk about you. The next few days, while we waited for me to bring you home to us for good, we met up with your eyes everywhere! There was an advertisement for powdered milk at the time, with a baby on the poster. The same eyes!”

The girl bursts out laughing.

Born for the second time in this room flooded with sunlight through which, a short time before, an unknown couple had walked, the woman first, the man walking behind her.

“My mother first, my father …,” the young girl repeats.

All the years would go by like a lazy summer siesta, but how long it took to overcome the ordeal of crossing that room to choose, that span of time. Walking alongside the peril and keeping a sharp eye out not to be thirsty for it!

Succumbing, from that point on, to the lurking anxiety silently beginning, I keep for myself the burden of this mystery.

On the sunny doorstep a young girl — my daughter — is preparing to go out.

THE YOUNG GIRL

My daughter is twenty and lives in Algiers. Enrolled at the university, she is waiting to get a room in the student residence halls.

The first days of October 1988. Suddenly she finds herself alone in a friend’s deserted apartment. In the city the young people, the children, are demonstrating, marching, destroying things. The police sound the retreat. The army is in the city. Tanks at night. Insurrection. Blood in the streets …

My daughter, alone … I take the first plane at dawn the next day; when I arrive, the driver of the last available taxi at the airport consents to take me.

Finding my daughter; we stay in this apartment on the heights, hemmed in but together; every night we sit unmoving to watch the city through the large bay windows — Algiers deserted and under curfew.

Two or three weeks later the young girl goes back to her studies. Three years go by. Shortly before the heavily charged October anniversary, she calls me on the phone: “They have just offered me a teaching appointment in …”

She tells me the name of the city: her father’s city, the one in which women secretly refer to every husband, real or potential, as “the enemy.” How will my daughter be able to fall in love someday in the midst of “enemies”?

I give a start. “Refuse,” I advise her. “And take the next plane. Please. Come home!”

When she arrives, she decides to go on with her studies in the provinces, in Rouen. I tell her with a smile that at present there is only one place I am familiar with there — the prison. “So we will discover the Seine and the cathedral and Corneille’s house, and …”

I was joking. To tell the truth, I had just understood that through my only daughter I was maintaining a tradition, barely outlined up to this point: with my grandmother (who permanently left the zaouia for the city) and my mother (spontaneously turning her back on the old ways and instinctively open to the new). Now I was making my daughter, who had been ready to settle into her father’s country, into the latest fugitive.

Smugglers together from that point on, she and I: bearing what furtive message, what silent desire?

“The desire for freedom,” you’d say of course.

“Oh no,” I would reply. “Freedom is far too vast a word! Let us be more modest, desiring only to breathe in air that is free.”

WHILE FILMING THE LAST of the location shots I find myself up in a crane about sixty feet above a field with the cameraman. We are trying to get a long, panoramic shot of the Roman aqueduct that is still the boundary of the old area outside Caesarea.

The crane’s platform where we are installed and where the cameraman is now attempting to work is not stable enough. It is an early morning in June, the light is full of nuance, brilliant in the distance …

“Are we ever going to manage to get a good shot?”

The camera moves: the cameraman grumbles. Suddenly from up high I see at my feet, way down below, near the truck controlling our movements in the sky, a stele almost exactly beneath our feet.

In the end we redescend. The cameraman wants to have it out with the man driving the crane … I go over to the tree, an oak, and lean over to look at the stele almost in its shadow. I read the Arabic inscription. The stele was set up a few years before: It marks the hundredth anniversary of the last insurrection here in these mountains during the last century, in 1871. In honor, says the inscription, of Malek el-Berkani.