Bitter Almonds

Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2012 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris
First publication 2013 by Europa Editions
Translation by Alison Anderson
Original Title:
Les amandes amères
Translation copyright © 2013 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609451110

Laurence Cossé

BITTER ALMONDS

Translated from the French
by Alison Anderson

There's a ring at the door. Édith is at work on the dining room table. I won't get it, she thinks, the hell with it. Who could it be? It's almost dark. But she gets up, and goes to open.

It's Aïcha, the concierge from number 31, all smiles and in the company of an older woman. Édith wasn't expecting this. She often sees Aïcha, in the street, in the shops; she's a neighborhood feature, they call her Radio Aïcha. But she's never seen her in her building. Aïcha, moreover, apologizes, with little movements of her head and hands; she'll be quick. She's ringing at every door in the street.

“Maybe you know my mother?” she says, not waiting for an answer. “She's looking for work.”

The woman standing next to her is impassive. She holds herself very straight, her mouth pursed, a black headscarf knotted tightly beneath her chin, her hands crossed over her belly. Impassive and tense, notes Édith, who wonders for a moment whether she speaks French. She was working at a dry cleaner's in Passy, explains Aïcha. Six months ago the cleaner went out of business; no one took over from him, and his two employees were let go.

“My mother has been looking everywhere,” says Aïcha, “she hasn't found anything. She'll be penniless soon, they've signed her up for part-time . . . well, never mind the details. She can iron to perfection, and she can sew, so I got an idea. If fifteen or twenty families in the neighborhood take her on for two or three hours a week, she'll be in the clear. She could keep her room.”

 

Gilles is delighted with the idea. For ten years he's been giving a lot of time and a bit of money to SNC,
Solidarités nouvelles face au chômage
, an association that provides assistance to jobless people until they find work again. One of the ways they go about it is to finance short-term contracts with the dues and donations of their members.

“Basically Aïcha's idea is the SNC all over,” says Gilles enthusiastically, “real neighborhood solidarity.”

So he's all for it. It's true that in this household he's the one who does the bulk of the ironing. Édith is useless at ironing. She can't stand it. Gilles doesn't mind, he's happy enough to do his own shirts, but the boys' jeans, or the tablecloths and pillowcases, that's a real bore.

 

Done deal, then. Not right away, and not just in this street alone. But the upshot is that within three months Fadila is working twenty to twenty-five hours a week. That's all she wants. “I'm not young,” she says. You need time for yourself, after all. She lives in Saint-Augustin but she buys her bread on the avenue de Clichy, the flat bread she likes and which keeps well; she goes to the baths Boulogne, they're very clean, “not like out in the suburbs.”

 

She comes on Tuesdays between four and seven. Or five and seven, if she's been held up, or twenty to four and six if her son's coming over for supper and she has to cook. Or Wednesday if she's been really busy on Tuesday and could only have come for an hour.

It annoys Édith. Gilles doesn't care, he never gets home before eight in the evening. But Édith works at home, already it's hard enough with the children, she needs to know when she will be alone.

“I no see problem,” retorts Fadila. What difference does it make whether she comes Tuesday or Wednesday? She has the keys. She knows what she has to do, she can manage her schedule on her own.

 

Already on the second Tuesday she looked Édith right in the eye and said, “I never been to school.” She was wearing her wooden face. Édith took several weeks to understand that obviously this meant she could neither read nor write French, but that she had not learned to read or write Arabic either.

Before long she is bringing letters, often still sealed. Bills, summons, advertisements, she can't tell them apart, any form of mail frightens her. She has to get someone else to read it to her. “I'm stupid,” she says. She doesn't know how to sign her name: she just scribbles a little zigzag.

She has no trouble speaking on the telephone, but she never calls. At first, Édith gets annoyed. “It's all right if you change the time, or even the day, but give us a call. Call ahead.” Until the day she understood why Fadila wouldn't do anything of the sort. Dialing the number is the problem. Fadila keeps an old notebook in her bag, with telephone numbers marked in different handwriting and colors. “You put notebook telephone number,” she asked, the day she informed Édith she had never been to school. She can read numbers—“a little bit”: she shrugs one shoulder, she has to be able to read the prices in the shops, after all.

But reading the phone numbers in her notebook, that's another matter altogether. She cannot tell them apart.

The most awkward thing is that she can't really get around other than by bus. From the bus she can see where she is, she can recognize the place so she knows where to get off. She can only take the métro if it's direct, and if someone goes with her several times first to show her which direction to go and which platform to wait on, and how to count the number of stations. “After is okay,” she says. So she can go to see her other daughter, Zora, in Aubervilliers, for example. But she is incapable of changing trains. And no, she doesn't like asking strangers for help.

To get to the fifteenth arrondissement where Gilles and Édith live, she takes the number 80 bus from Saint-Augustin. More than once she has arrived late, and in a foul temper. “They having demonstration, I been waiting the bus forty-five minutes.” Or the number 80 had to make a detour, so she panicked and got out at Les Invalides and went the rest of the way on foot. She walked for half an hour. Why did she get out at Les Invalides and not somewhere closer? Because she knows Les Invalides, she recognizes the place. From there she can find her way. Monuments are beacons for her. With the streets she gets all mixed up.

 

Her French is comprehensible but full of mistakes, particularly with the verbs, and she tends to drop auxiliaries altogether (“I no understand,” “I no come”); other approximations can be charming (she says “He kiss you” for “She congratulates you”—she frequently confuses he and she), and from time to time she'll come out with a perfectly idiomatic expression, such as “I overdid it” or “I cannot say no to that old lady.”

 

She is not really sure how old she is. On her documents it says she was born in 1945, but she knows for a fact it can't be true. When she moved to France, they asked her for her date of birth, and she said she didn't know. The immigration officer looked at her for a moment then said, “I'll put 1945, is that all right?” Fadila still thinks it's funny. To get younger like that, all at once: it's not an offer you turn down.

If her mother were still alive, she would be able to dig up the year of her birth. She would go about it in the way that was usual in Morocco back in the days before they had registrars who kept records: she would say, “the year the almond trees froze,” “the fourth year of the great drought,” or “the year of the earthquake.”

 

“Haven't you ever wanted to learn how to read?” Édith asks.

“Yes, one time I starting!” says Fadila. A few years earlier she had signed up for a class, in a parish not far from her home; she's forgotten the name of the church. “I no continue.”

The instructor had called her several times, insisting she continue the class. “She say I nearly there.” The others in the class had all learned to read. Fadila shrugs.

Had she given up because it was too difficult? She couldn't manage? On the contrary. “The lady she say I am the best to recognize the letters.” As she speaks she points with her chin and her hand, as if at a blackboard.

But the class was held in the evening, and it wasn't exactly next door. Fadila found it hard to go back out after dinner.

 

She rarely smiles. When she comes in she says hello, and looks Édith straight in the eye without smiling. If something is bothering her, she keeps quiet and puts on her stony expression. Édith can hear her banging the ironing board, the chair, the door.

 

She knows she has to sign a check the minute she gets it. Before stuffing it into her bag she turns it over and on the back carefully traces that sort of Z that passes for her signature.

 

Sometimes it's frightening, the way she looks at you. You can see an inner violence surfacing, about to explode, every instant filled with a bitterness she keeps in check as best she can when she's in the presence of people who are not close to her.

She is so hard, so much of the time, that you find you have to be on your guard with her, always ready to step back.

 

As far as her living quarters are concerned, she can't complain. Her seventh-floor room is small, but it's “in good neighborhood,” rue de Laborde. “Calm.” “There are only rich people.” Her floor is well-kept and her neighbors are quiet: “A Cambodian gentleman” who's been there for over twenty years, a “very nice” Tunisian couple, a student whose grandparents live on the sixth floor.

Fadila rents her room for e120 a month from a lady who lives in the building, and she knows that's not expensive. The only problem is that the lady doesn't want to give her a receipt for the rent. She wants to be paid cash. And at the office of social services at the
mairie,
where Fadila, on more than one occasion, has been offered a housing subsidy, they explained that to obtain it she will absolutely have to produce the receipts for her rent.

 

When she goes out she wears a black headscarf, tied beneath her chin, to hide her hair. Her clothes are long, skirt and coat down to her ankles. But no one notices her, no one thinks, when they see her: there goes a veiled woman.

For work she gets changed. She removes her black headscarf and puts on a white one, which she ties behind her neck instead. She wears a white overall made of very thick cloth; on the front, printed in indelible blue ink, are the words AP-HP Hôpital Cochin. “Are you a nurse?” asks little Paul. She laughs, ruffles his hair: “No, I buying this overall at the flea market in Saint-Ouen.”

 

She has a soft spot for Paul. She's noticed that of the three boys he's the only one who is at all practical. One day the iron wasn't working, the steam wouldn't come out. Neither Fadila nor even Édith had a clue what was wrong. Paul had a look at the iron and in three seconds he'd unblocked the thing.

A few weeks later, the ironing board has gone all wobbly. Two screws have gone missing. “Where's Paul?” grumbles Fadila. Édith glances at her watch: “He'll be home in a quarter of an hour.” Fadila relaxes. Paul will know how to repair the ironing board. “He's smart boy.”

 

Gilles and Édith's bedroom has saffron walls, a dark pink carpet (a lovely pink, intense without being garish), and windows with heavy curtains with a dominant orange note. “Is beautiful colors,” Fadila says to Édith. “Congratulations! Is colors like Morocco, very pretty.”

One Tuesday—it is the beginning of March, Fadila has been coming for four months now—she takes a pile of identical papers, all in a mess, from her handbag. They are her bank statements. Her daughter-in-law, who was a secretary in Morocco before she got married, noticed that on the statements there were a dozen or so withdrawals for the amount of e7.50 over the last three months. Fadila doesn't know what they could be.